Have you ever run into a problem like this before? You’ve been workin two days straight on the newly installed SharePoint 2010 Farm, everything run perfectly and you’re about to release it in production. The Network Administrator calls and says he has a problem with one of the servers. There’s a mispell in the name of the machine, and it’s not following the IT naming convention. So the server must be renamed. In the Windows Server world, this action is very easy to execute, but with a SharePoint 2010 farm, renaming a server has some consequences. In fact, the name of a server is stored in the SharePoint Configuration Database, many communications between servers member of a SharePoint Farm are based on the server name. It’s logical. Tied with the LAN DNS, changing an IP address of one of the servers has no impact if all communications are based on server name.

Because of this name retention in the configuration database, do we need to reinstall the SharePoint Application if the name is changed? Fortunally no! Again PowerShell comes at the rescue.

1. First rename the server in Windows
2. Run this PowerShell Command using the SharePoint 2010 Shell Command.

Rename-SPServer –Identity “wfb1″ –Name “WFE1″

The complete reference is available on TechNet.

Friday night, I’ve prepared myself to update SharePoint the following week-end to Service Pack 1 and August 2011 Cumulative Update. I’ve started the update at 4AM Saturday morning and it tooks 13 hours to complete. My biggest fear was to run into a failure process. So to reduce my stress, I’ve taken a lot of precautions.

Backup or die
Never, ever going down the road of update without knowing the way to come back. Not only checking if the backup is good, but making sure to control the process to restore it and making work. So, in my case, I’ve asked my admin collegues to take an Image SnapShot of each SharePoint Server 2010, and a special SQL Backup of all my SharePoint databases. And also, I’ve asked them, nicely, if they were available over the week-end.

Training, it’s like working without stress
When an astronaut goes into space, he trains and repeats the work he will do up there. Working in a production environment is the same principal. Don’t do something in production, if you didn’t have tried it before. Three times I have repeat theses update steps in my non-production farms. And every time, I ran into different problems.

Review the steps again and again… and again.
Microsoft has written great articles on how to prepare and how to install an update on SharePoint Server 2010. These two articles are my bedtime reading for the last days… And believe me, it helps to sleep.

• Prepare to deploy software updates
• Install a software update

Stay close, but be polite with your guests
During the update process, there is nothing to do but waiting for a process completion in order to start the next. In my pre-production farm, it took more than an hour for August 2011 Cumulative update to complete on one server. So I put my laptop on the kitchen table, keep an eye on it from time to time, an prepare the dinner. And for the info… The salmon was pretty good, perfectly grill on the my BBQ.

Reboot, PSConfig, IISReset, Recycle App, WSP and Mary has a little lamb
I’m glad, it’s over. 13 hours later, I’m glad to say that my effort paid off. My SharePoint 2010 production farm is now running under SP1 and August 2011 CU.

Step by Step update process for SP1 and CU