Installing MOSS 2007 on a single standalone machine

Normal
installation of MOSS 2007 require a farm of computers like domain
controller, database server and atlast a web server for a reasonable
performance. But if you are a home user like me, who has unfortunately
only a single laptop , even then you can install MOSS 2007 on your PC
without installing Active Directory and that too with good performance.

The key to installing on a single machine is not
choosing the standalone option while installing MOSS 2007. The
standalone option works fine when installed with a domain account but
on a standalone machine it fails on Step 8 with SQLException of failed
login.

To Install MOSS 2007 on a single machine follow these steps:

  • Do a clean installation of Windows Server 2003
  • Install SP1
  • Configure the server as Application server with ASP.net support.
  • Install .net 2.0 framework
  • Install Windows Workflow components beta 2
  • Install either SQL 2k5, 2k or SQL Express
  • Install MOSS 2007 and choose complete option.

When
it asks for the database server in the configuration wizard, give the
name of your own machine as the database server. This is installing
farm configuration but on the single machine.This way you dont even
need the domain controller or a domain account.