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I want to turn on the search in my local development MOSS 2007 install.

  • I have an account on the local computer
  • I am in the Farm Administrators group
  • I can log into Central Admin and see many of the settings

But when I try to Manage This Farms Shared Services I get the following error

You do not have the correct permissions to perform this task. You must be a member of the local administrators group. For more information, contact your system administrator.

I inherited this farm, and the guy who set it up a couple of years ago doesn't recall much of what he did. I need to be able to give him some pretty clear directions on where to add me so I can get work

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2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

You should be granted permission on the SSP Administration site collection. If you are given Viewer rights, you can see all of the administration pages, however, you will need to have other permissions granted for some items to be managed. I would set it to full control on that site collection.

For more information: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262153(office.12).aspx

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Ah ha! So the SSP is a different site? So being a Farm Admin doesn't make me a site collection admin in the SSP? –  MrChrister Apr 8 '11 at 22:36
This is correct. It is a different site and a different web application than Central Administration. –  Lori Apr 10 '11 at 20:10
hmm in SP2010 you also need to be local administrator to be able to see services. not sure ifi this is the case too for moss –  Anders Rask Apr 11 '11 at 7:19
@Anders Rask - I am in the local admin group on the machine, unless I do not understand local admin. –  MrChrister Apr 11 '11 at 21:59
yep thats it :-) –  Anders Rask Apr 12 '11 at 6:37
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Lori's answer is best for your specific question, but if you just inherited this farm, there are a lot of other things you will need to get from the previous admin. Here are a few:

  1. The ID and password for all related service accounts, including Setup, Farm, Application Pool, Search, Crawl and SSP.
  2. If your farm uses one ID for all of the IDs mentioned above, add "Rebuild Farm" to your list of tasks. What you have right now is dangerous from a security perspective and is not recommended for a production farm.
  3. Add your Administrative domain ID into the Local Administrators group for each server in the farm (ideally, this would be handled via being added to the proper AD group)
  4. Learn about the database server. Where is it? who manages it? How is it set for resources? Which exact version of SQL Server is it running? What patch level?
  5. If your database server is not managed by a DBA, then you will need permissions into that database instance as well.
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thanks for the info. It isn't a production farm, we are trying to figure out what to ask for from the production folks. I will look into the perms stuff and the database. Everything is on two machines for us here with the DB being the standout. –  MrChrister Apr 8 '11 at 22:38
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