I had some fun this week setting up SharePoint to run on my Windows Home Server.  It actually went very smoothly. I was surprised.

I downloaded the WSS 3.0 SP1 installation package and just went through the standard installation, setting it up as a standalone server.   After that completed, I noticed that the install had created a new web application on port 80, and shut down the default Home Server site.  This was fairly simple to work around. 

I went into SharePoint Central Administration and changed the host header for the default site to "share.mydomain.com”.  My goal was to be able to browse to it using a simple to remember URL and be able to also get to the home server’s default admin site via a different host header like “homeserver.mydomain.com”. 

In order to get this to work, you have to set the proper CNAME alias in your DNS provider.  I use GoDaddy and they have a fairly simple to use tool for setting the CNAME aliases.  I just added a CNAME for “share” and a CNAME for “homeserver”  and pointed them both to my domain that is provided by Windows Homeserver’s virtual IP service  which looks like this: myserver.homeserver.com.

After setting up the CNAME’s in my DNS, I went back to my home server and added the host header to my Windows Home Server default Web via Inetmgr.exe.   Remember to set the host header to the full domain name “share.mydomain.com” or else it won’t work!  I made that mistake first by setting the host header to just “share” thinking that IIS was actually smart.

Next I just restarted the default web and I was now able to get to both my home server admin page and my root SharePoint web collection.  I could keep building on this on my home server by pointing to a blog.mydomain.com, or video.mydomain.com, etc…  

My next attempt is to see if I can get PHP running with WordPress hosted on my Home Server as well so I can customize my themes more! The new Microsoft Web Application installer could help me out there. It installs PHP in IIS and also optionally can set up WordPress for you.