Host header (actually Host Named) site collection in MOSS (some details)
If you search on the web on how to create a host header (HH) site-collection you will get a lot of results as lot of community folks have blogged about it. Thanks to all of them for the great work. So following is the command used to create a HH site-collection is:
stsadm -o createsite -url http://THE-HOST-HEADER-FOR-THE-SITE-COLLECTION -ownerlogin DOMAIN\username -owneremail username@domain.com -hhurl http://THE-URL-OF-THE-WEBAPPLICATION-THE-SITE-COLLECTION-IS-GOING-INTO (take from: http://callahansspace.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!A125D1CFA42E21F7!860.entry)
And in case if you want to create it in a new content database then following is something you can use, inspired and referred from http://sharepointhawaii.com/wenhe/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=dbcd4f5c%2D63e1%2D416c%2Db34a%2Ddd391d48beab&ID=9:
stsadm -o CreateSiteInNewDB -URL http://The URL for HH site collection -owneremail myemail@myserver.com
-ownerlogin domain\username -HHURL http://The webapp in which sitecollection needs to be provisioned -databaseserver DBServerName
-databasename NameOfTheNewDBForSiteCollection
I had some simple queries on some basics of the hostheader (host named) site collection and Troy Starr (from MOSS Product team) was a *BIG* help (as always) in answering my queries:
Queries:
Q: how does Sharepoint handle the HH site urls (as there is no entry anywhere on the IIS) how does sharepoint know about the url to the HH site (when the url itself is different). basically I have a web-app with url: http://usctapMOSS now i create a HH site-collection with a url: http://msfturltest.abc.com and then I create a required DNS entry for that url now how does sharepoint know to redirect the "http://msfturltest.abc.com" to the correct site-collection in the http://usctapMOSS web-app.
A: When the IIS web site receives the request for _http://msfturltest.abc.com, it will pass it off to SharePoint. SharePoint will then look at the properties of the request, including its protocol scheme, host name, and port number, to determine the request URL. It will then look up that request URL in its internal table of AAM URLs and host-named site collection URLs to find a match. Once it has a match, it opens the site collection associated with that URL and goes from there. The internal table referred here is logical and by looking at the Path column in the configuration database's SiteMap table we can see the host headers assigned to individual site collections. Also note that this lookup information for the site will be cached on the WFE after the first browse.
Q: Can we restore a backup taken from a non-HH site-collection to a HH-kind of site-collection. (Both the source and target site-collection are in the same web-app and have their own Content database each).
A: In general, yes, you can back up a non-HH site collection and restore it as an HH site collection. Also, in case if this restore of a host-named site collection causes a content database corruption, we can try to fix that corruption by immediately running the stsadm -o renamesite operation after the restore and renaming the HH site URL to itself.
Thought of sharing this information in case if someone else had similar doubts.
