What a pain in the arse!

I was installing Microsoft’s SharePoint Portal Server 2003 for the good majority of today and kept running into a problem with the Central Administration website - it wouldn’t start! When trying to start it, I would only receive the error “The parameter is incorrect”.

As it turns out, the required application pool wasn’t getting created for some unknown reason. It took a little bit of digging, but I did find the reason at the usual place. Apparently you need to use the form server_name\user_account instead of simply user_account - the install isn’t smart enough to resolve the name without explicitly defining the server name. That seems a little ridiculous to me. You would think the install would do some sort of verification during the install. Guess not!