As part of my quest (still unresolved) to see how I can manage to persuade the Central Admin site to use a different Application Pool (or even to see which one it IS using so I can maybe change what's using that), I tried to see if Extending a Web Application could help.

It didn't of course but I did see the useful information that this is what you would use if you wanted to have a second "version" of a site (for say Extranet) in which the content was the same but the access rights different.

That seemed interesting and remarkably easy and so (as I don't have an Extranet handy) I decided to use this as a way of remembering the port of my (still pure and innocent) Publishing Site and thus set about having this also as port 12345.

[I quickly abandoned the idea of getting a number of random numbers until I found one I liked :)]

It was remarkably easy and as I now have an different Application Pool for this one too, it means I can (if I can find out how!!) re-assign the normal Application Pool used now for the Publishing Site to use this one as well. This in turn will free that normal Application Pool (for 38782 as it happens) to be used for the Central Admin site (17757) which is the one now complaining it can't be sharing an Application Pool with something else (see the previous post's P.S.).

There was on small snag caused by my total incomprehension of what I was actually doing when extending a web application to a second port.

Namely that I **didn't** now have an additional 12345 Web Application but simply a new port for the old 38782 Web Application.

It seems 100% logical when you write it like that - and it is - but bear with me and look at what you actually do to create this extended web application and you'll see I hope how the mix-up comes about.

To extend the web application you can specify a new application pool with a new description *just as you did when creating a new web application*. Then you specify whether this new address is going to be default; internet, intranet, custom or extranet again just as before.

This is where the problems started. It offered me Intranet and I chose Internet because my alternate access mappings had worked best with that setting in the past.

I then went to the Alternate Access mappings page and tried to specify the 12345 web application. Loop now while I do this a few time. Eventually I decide something is wrong and delete the 12345 setting that is listed on the Alternate Access Mappings home page.

I'll miss out a few more loops before pointing out that all I had succeeded in doing was to remove the alternate access alternative for Internet use for 38782. My allocating 12345 to Internet had removed the existing Internet version for 38782 and now by deleting it I'd removed the 12345 Internet version *for 38782*.

Now I could no longer access the Publishing site from away from the server.

The fix was of course easy. 12345 was in fact still there. 38782 was still there. So all I had to do was go into Alternate Access mappings again. Select the Mapping selection 38782 (top-right) and then use "Edit Public URLs" to add back the variant of the 38782 name to the Internet slot and add the variant of the 12345 name to the (in this case) Custom slot.

[Note in another oddity, that if you try to change the slot used by a particular URL variant by clicking on it in the Alternate Access Mapping page you get to the unfortunately named "Edit Internal URLs" page which never lets you amend it!]

I can now access the site using the 12345 address from a remote client. I can also access the site using the 38782 address from a remote client. Now to see that both pages have only correct (remote) links (Internet will; I'm not sure about Custom) and then to play around a bit with seeing if different groups of people can access one but not the other.

P.S. The only link that still goes to a URL that works ONLY on the server is (as I half expected) the My Sites link for 12345 (Extranet setting remember). 38782 set as Internet works fine and My Sites is the full correct external address. I'll try changing 12345 to Custom without much hope (Intranet didn't work last time I tried it) of things improving.

P.P.S. As I thought, neither Custom nor Extranet mean that 12345's MySite link points to the correct external URL.