Todd Klindt gets a lot of respect in the SharePoint Administration community.

He should. He consults, writes, speaks, webcasts publicly weekly and leads a user group with a consistently great rating.

Todd highly recommends a scripted configuration approach to SharePoint. And he’s not the only one, but mostly I’ve ignored that advice in the past. However, as a new co-worker of Todd’s, I’ve heard him recommend to clients more than once in the 7 weeks I’ve worked with him to use the SharePoint PowerShell Scrip New-SPConfigurationDatabase to eliminate a GUID in the Admin Content Database Name compared to the Configuration Wizard.

Could you live with GUIDs in the names of your databases? Maybe. I certainly could, up until now. I’ve occasionally had DBAs at consulting clients who complained that the GUIDs did not fit their naming conventions. But it’s never been a stopping block, just an occasional annoyance. And I’ve tried scripted install methods before. At the Microsoft Certified Master Rotation 4, many of my classmates swore by scripted installs. I tried then, but only found it to be getting in my way. They promised it would make installing faster. But for me, at the time, it just slowed me down because I was very proficient already with the configuration wizard.

If you decide you don’t want to have GUIDs, or, like me, you just want to follow Todd’s advice so you have a consistent approach with shared clients, you may come across some of the same issues I have in my first attempt. If so, watch out for these error messages.

Error Messages for New-SPConfigurationDatabase

1. Requested registry access is not allowed

I received this error on my first try at New_SPConfigurationDatabase. It’s not really specific to that command, but something I’ve come across before running the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell in a newly installed environment, but often forget. I wasn’t running the Shell as Administrator. Easy enough to fix googling the error and finding threads like this TechNet Forum Post.

2. The user does not exist or is not unique

This error occurred when I entered the farm account name, sp_farm, without the domain’s shortname. Even when I entered the domain name in front of the user name, Rackspacesp_farm, I received this error again. After some trial and error and research, it appears that you have to exit the Shell after the first time you receive the error or you will receive it again, even with the proper domainusername form.

3. Some or all identity references could not be translated

One of my attempts to get around the 2nd error above was to enter the fully qualified domain name syntax for my farm account, sp_farm@rackspace.local. According to one blog post I found, that version of the account name has too many characters in it!

Reference

• SharePoint 2010 Install Guidance, 3/21/2012, Todd Klindt’s Blog
• How to create a SharePoint 2010 farm with no GUIDs using PowerShell, 11/14/2010, Todd Klindt’s Blog
• Professional SharePoint 2010 Administration, June 21, 2010, Todd Klindt, Shane Young, Steve Caravajal, Ph. D, Wrox
• Error while running New-SPConfigurationDatabase PS, TechNet Forums
• SharePoint 2010 Single Server Install Roadblock, November 25, 2009, Joel Ward’s Blog
• SharePoint 2010: Some or all identity references could not be translated, 27/05/2010, James Boman’s Blog