The SharePoint Swiss Army Knife

Howdy y’all, just doing some documentation here. If you ever need to use the User Profile Replication Engine from the SharePoint Administrator’s Toolkit, you may run into the following errors when trying to retrieve data from the properties list:

Cannot retrieve properties

Cannot access Web Service

After tinkering for over a day, I think I got it figured out. My farm configuration is as follows:

Port 80 : Collaboration Portal
Port 81: My Sites
Port 100: Central Administration
Port 103: SSP

Troubleshooting Steps

When I tried to connect to Port 81 as the Source URL I would get one of the above errors. Same thing when trying to connect to the SSP or Collaboration Portal as the source URL. I then proceeded to tear down my SSP and My Site Host a few times (on a dev box) and eventually rebuilt my My Site Host to be on Port 80. After I did that it finally worked. The bad news is that I didn’t have the luxury of tearing down the SSP and My Site Host in the production environment where I had to do this stuff. So I moved my My Site host back to Port 81, tried the User Replication Tool again and noticed that it was still working when using Port 80 as the source URL.

What was it?

The User Replication Tool seems to be looking for the “userprofileservice.asmx” web service on port 80 no matter which web application is hosting the My Sites. For some reason or another my port 80 didn’t have the proper web services in it. After resolving that issue, I also noticed that it still won’t work with port numbers in the URL. For example http://localhost works but http://localhost:81 doesn’t work even though the My Sites are hosted on port 81. I validated this by renaming the web service on Port 80 and used Port 81 as the source URL which still generated the error.

Another Error…

After getting the Configuration Tab all set up, I went over to the Full Replication tab to do an actual replication. I was once again presented with the “Cannot access Web Service” error. This time around I didn’t feel like figuring out what the root cause was and instead tried running the application as the app pool account and then it worked!