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Why Alternate Access Mappings will give you a headache

I love the new Alternate Access Mappings feature in MOSS 2007 (not available in WSS) but it can be a major pain in the behind.

One of the things you probably will stumble upon when installing MOSS is the need to expose some or all of the content to the outside. So far I've been lucky enough to deal with situations where it's all or nothing, making life somewhat easier. Still, there's quite a few things that can foul up the waters, including AAM.

Now, if you're going to expose MOSS, or any web site, to the outside you will want to do this via https (at least not plain old http) which means that you'll need to make sure that MOSS understands https:/... access and, most likely, start using https internally as well. This involves, besides installing certificates, changing the AAM settings.

The thing with AAM is that it (AFAIK, correct me if I'm wrong) controls all the automatic URL's generation throughout that collection. This means that if you need to change the My Site location from http://mysite.corporate.com to https://mysite.corporate.com you need to update the AAM to reflect this. To do this you change the Default mapping for the My Site AAM collection from http://mysite... to https://mysite...

If you fail to change the AAM before you update the My Site location MOSS happily and without telling you changes back to http://mysite... If you're really lucky you'll get something along the lines of https://mysite.corporate.com:80 which, of course, doesn't go over very well.

Another thing to keep in mind is that when installing certificates for both the main MOSS web application and the My Site web application they need to be assigned specific IP-addresses or one of the applications will fail to start, most likely the My Site application. This is because even if you can use host headers for port 80 this doesn't work with SSL traffic.

In conclusion; be midful of your AAM settings as they dictate quite a bit of what's happening in your MOSS server.

Read the complete post at http://www.sharepointblogs.com/martinnr5/archive/2007/12/11/why-alternate-access-mappings-will-give-you-a-headache.aspx