Accessing Portal & Server after changing hostname

[ShanmugaRaja]

I have installed Portal & Server and federated my server with Portal. Configured Webadaptor to work with Portal & Server also. I could not able to access Portal For ArcGIS site, after changing my computer machine name (hostname). I there is any way to access my Portal & Server ?

[JayantaPoddar]

Hi Raja,

Try the following two steps and revert with your observation

1) In IIS Manager, generate a new SSL certificate and bind it with port 443 (https). Restart services of Portal and Server.

2) Reconfigure ArcGIS web-adaptor with Server and Portal.

[PaulDavidson1]

Changing server names after installing Portal and Server is very problematic and not a recommended practice.

You could well be better off starting from scratch after you have settled on appropriate machine names.

I personally would not want to support a changed name server, even if I were to get it working again.

Anytime an issue comes up, I would be wondering if something were broken or disconnected deep down in the setup.

[RandallWilliams]

Hi Paul,

Can you elaborate on this observation?

We support server hostname changes for Server and Portal. Typically the only thing action items required are to re-generate/reapply certificates and re-register the web adaptor to use the new hostname. I'd like to understand more about any challenges you may be experiencing.

Common problems and solutions—Documentation (10.4) | ArcGIS for Server

[PaulDavidson1]

HI Randall:

I believe my comment came from an observation in another conversation regarding using the Esri Chef cookbooks.  Maybe the server name changes and associated difficulties are more related to using a Chef cookbook than to modifying things by hand.  I believe one issue I had was related to IP changes and that was solved by some configuration mods to the cookbooks.

Good to see that Esri supports an AGS name change.  Does that also apply to Portal (reload Cert and web adaptor)?

How about DataStore?  And if the AGS is a federated hosting server, no issues there?  Do you have to rebuild the DataStore link?

That said, my, well, too many years to say, of IT experience has taught me that changing server names can be problematic.  There can be issues beyond Esri software (depending on the server setup.)  SIDs may or may not change and some software encodes off the SID, etc...  DNS can come into play, etc...  I guess I've been burned in the past by trying to change a name that I've just stopped doing it.  My experience has been that it's often easier to rebuild the server from scratch.  That of course depends on a lot of other factors.  If my AGS had been up for a long enough time that I had a lot of services setup and running, etc... then maybe I'd try to change it.

But then that means that you're now down into the weeds and working over links that point to a server no longer there, etc...  I suspect a lot of the pain could be mitigated or made worse depending on how one's organization is setup and using Web GIS.  My gut (which we know how scientifically valid that is) tells me that the longer the server has been up in operation, the harder the name change will be but also the harder to rebuild the server.

In my case, when I realized I needed to change a setup name, our setup was new and with Chef and VMs, I tossed the old one out after pushing the cookbook up to our source code server (Hg), pulled a new VM, pulled the cookbooks down, swapped some names and was back up in about an hour (maybe two, you know how the mind forgets time and pain and suffering.)

Thanks for the info.  I'd be very curious to hear from Raja how well his swap went.

[RandallWilliams]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for that excellent response. In terms of stand-alone portal, the same rule applies.

That said, I haven't personally tested what happens after federation or what happens if data store is installed. Before I speak to these questions, I'm going to test this scenario in my sandbox and follow up. I strongly suspect that a name change is going to break a lot of these workflows from this standpoint.

Thinking about this deeper and playing it out in my head, the data store component seems like it might be challenging to deal with. So does changing hostnames when the server is federated with a Portal.

This is good conversation. I'll follow up.

[PaulDavidson1]

Hey Randall:

Check out:  https://github.com/Esri/arcgis-cookbook/issues/33

for the long winded discussion of changing names and DS, etc...

Might be something of interest there for your thought processes.

[OrcaMaritime]

Randall,

I'm currently experiencing some problems accessing my portal and server sites after a hostname change, and was wondering if you came to any conclusions/solutions for dealing with an Enterprise configuration post name change.