Korby Parnell recently stated on his blog that a second beta release of Team System is due out this month. Considering the problems I have been having installing this, I can't wait.

Last night, I blew away the application server completely and reinstalled it from scratch. This is the third complete reinstall (including a fresh Windows OS). I can't count the number of times I've reinstalled pieces of it.

The application server is now working properly. The SharePoint portal web site is back up and running. Earlier, I was getting an error “Cannot connect to configuration database”. I think I know what caused it - I had moved the primary domain server from the application tier to the database tier, without uninstalling Sharepoint Services.

I didn't realize this, but installing SharePoint Services also installs a version of SQL Server. Inside SQL Server is a configuration database STS_Config. Inside STS_Config is a number of database tables that have the name of the server hard-coded inside. I must have inadvertantly changed the name of the server when I moved the primary domain from the application tier to the database tier, because the configuration database has some wrong server names in it.

Once I blew everything away and reinstalled, it is now working better.

I am still having problems with the client tier. I might just blow that away and reinstall as well, since I finally have a working middle and database tier.