SharePoint 2010 Installations: Adding a second server to an existing SharePoint Server Farm

As many of you know, I’ve been working on building some hosted SharePoint 2010. I’m also trying to determine exactly what each service account needs rights/permissions to. I’ll have more on the specifics of the service accounts in an upcoming post, but the main service accounts I currently have are:

1. Install account
2. Farm account

The Install service account is what I use to run the SharePoint 2010 installation and configuration wizard.

The Farm service account is the account I use for app pools and database connectivity.

When you setup the configuration wizard this way, your configuration database is created by the farm account you specify, while the admin database is created with the install account. This doesn’t cause problems… until you try to connect a second SharePoint Server to the farm.

The Problems:

If you click the Retrieve Database names button you should get the following error:

Cannot find an existing configuration database located at the specified database server. Please choose a different database server.

If you type in the database name and click next, you should get the following error:

Failed to connect to the existing server farm located at the specified database server and database name. The database name is not a valid configuration database.

The Root Cause of The Problems:

The install service account you are using to run the configuration wizard on the second server has no rights to the configuration database that was created by the farm account during the first server install.

The Quick Fix

I went through to try and give minimal rights to allow the configuration wizard to pass, but only full rights works. To continue moving through the SharePoint 2010 configuration wizard, you must give the install service account db_owner rights/permissions.