We’ve recently set up a SharePoint server here at TheFARM which will run parts of our intranet and be our document management system.

So it got installed, but the problem was that it was installed onto a machine called mars. I made the obligatory jokes about ‘life on mars’ (admittedly I may have made the joke a few to many times :P) but at the end of last year we ran a competition to name the new intranet.

There were some fun names like SkyNet, and Randall, but ultimately the winning entry was TheBarn, which is very aptly farm-based.
But we had a problem, we don’t want to rename the server from mars (plus I’ve done that on SharePoint before, baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad idea), so how do you get SharePoint to accept http://thebarn when that’s not the machine name?

Unlike standard standard sites in IIS just adding a host header isn’t going to work, SharePoint will redirect you to the one it knows about, so although we were coming in via http://thebarn we’d end up at http://mars.

Hmmm…

Luckily it is actually very easy to do with SharePoint. SharePoint has the ability to Extend a web application:

So you navigate here, choose the Extend an existing Web application, select your site and enter the hostname (and set the port back to 80):

Now you’ll have a SharePoint site which listens on your new host header. You can go and delete the old one if you want (Remove SharePoint from IIS Web site) and then you’re done.