Building a WSS 3.0 Server

I'm rebuilding a development server that I'll be using for the conversion of www.benkoTIPs.com to document the various processes. So what are the steps in doing this?

We start with a base instance of Windows Server 2003 R2 with the latest updates installed. This version of Windows Server I added WSS 2.0 as one of the roles enabled for the server, this turned on ASP.NET 2.0 and configured IIS to host the site.

Next I installed the pre-requisites for upgrading the server in place. This involved downloading and installing the .NET 3.0 framework and downloading WSS 3.0 setup package. The upgrade requires that I'm starting with WSS 2.0 SP2 as my base so I had to add that as well before the upgrade worked. Once I did that I reran the WSS 3.0 upgrade and answered the option to install the new version alongside the existing one. I chose this instead of the suggested option of replacing because I'm interested to see the differences between the two. The install took about 10 minutes and then provided a link to start the configuration wizard. This then started the next step. The wizard then when through a 10 step process to create a configuration database and prepare WSS for use.

When this is complete it opens up the site and we can begin customizing and working with the site.