WSS 3: How to change App Pool identity for the Central Admin Console?

[SPV]

Hi folks.

I have struggling with this for days now and have come very close to breaking my development WSS 3.0 installation on several occasions. While it's been an interesting learning experience, the time has come to ask for help.

I'm running WSS 3.0 (pre SP1) on Windows 2003 SP2.

Anyone know how to (successfully) change the identity (user) of the Application Pool that runs the Central Admin Console? I have seen a MS page with instructions for doing this in WSS 2.0 but the options don't exist in 3.0.

I can almost get it to work if I change the identity directly in IIS, stop/start the Pool then run "stsadm -upgrade -inplace -url

http://{myserver:adminport}".

But when I next run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard it reverts to the old identity.

Of course I will need to run the Wizard from time to time after applying patches/updates, so this isn't a great option.

Anyone got any ideas to help me?

Thanks.
SPV

 

[SPV]

I have, at last, managed to solve this myself and I thought I'd post the solution in case anyone else gets stuck on the same problem.

The details are on

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934838/en-us,

which for some reason I failed to find when searching for what I thought were pretty obvious search terms.

In summary, the identity for the Application Pool that hosts the Central Admin Console cannot be changed in IIS (as I discovered). Instead it needs to be set through our old friend the [tt]stsadm[/tt] command:

[tt]stsadm -o updatefarmcredentials –userlogin DomainName\UserName -password NewPassword[/tt]

When done this way, the change is not reverted when the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard runs (which has to happen whenever a patch is applied).

You know I'm sure the [tt]stsadm[/tt] options keep changing. I have just found this page in Technet (

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Windo...-9fad9eb32ec71033.mspx&reldir=WSS/en/library)

which seems to be must more complete than the one I used to use.