Today I spent some time setting up a Tridion 2011 Content Manager server. In fact, the content manager had already been installed and had been working fine. Then we'd installed Microsoft Search Server. OK - so it's quite unusual to be doing quite so much all on one server, but this is a customer with minimal needs. Not everyone has 200 servers in the rack! Although Search Server is packaged as a product in it's own right, it's built on Sharepoint, and when you install it, it seems to bring two thirds of Sharepoint with it, including 2 MSSQL instances and three web sites. So to get the benefit of Microsoft's "free" search services, we'll probably have to configure another couple of gigs of RAM. (SFX: Sound of a cash register going "ca-ching" at VMWare headquarters)

Anyway to be fair, the search solution looks pretty good and it definitely does what it says on the box, although it's got about a hundred configuration screens (I haven't actually counted them, though). Well anyway - we'd installed this beast on our previously working Tridion server, and most things were going OK. Until I did an IISRESET, and then suddenly the Tridion CME started to complain about a 404 problem. So when you started the CME, you'd get error messages like:

The remote server returned an error (404) not found

On examining the message centre, I found this message 6 times, along with "Loading list of languages failed" and "Loading list of locales failed". Sure enough, the relevant drop-downs in the User preferences are not  populated.

When I F12'd the browser. (Is there a verb, to F12? There should be.) I could see that the browser wasn't seeing any responses with HTTP status 404. So what was going on?

After digging a bit on the server, I found that there were entries in the web server log like this:

2012-12-19 12:59:41 ::1 POST /WebUI/Models/CME/Services/General.svc/GetListCustomPages - 80 BLAH\Administrator ::1 - 404 0 0 58
2012-12-19 12:59:41 ::1 POST /WebUI/Models/CME/Services/General.svc/GetListFavorites - 80 BLAH\Administrator ::1 - 404 0 0 62
2012-12-19 12:59:41 ::1 POST /WebUI/Models/CME/Services/General.svc/GetListSystemAdministration - 80 BLAH\Administrator ::1 - 404 0 0 15
2012-12-19 12:59:41 ::1 POST /WebUI/Models/TCM54/Services/Lists.svc/GetList - 80 BLAH\Administrator ::1 - 404 0 0 30
2012-12-19 12:59:41 ::1 POST /WebUI/Models/TCM54/Services/Lists.svc/GetListEnumerationValues - 80 BLAH\Administrator ::1 - 404 0 0 5
2012-12-19 12:59:41 ::1 POST /WebUI/Models/TCM54/Services/Lists.svc/GetListEnumerationValues - 80 BLAH\Administrator ::1 - 404 0 0 8

So I could see from here that the errors were taking place when the CME web application made a local call-back on the server to it's own service layer. A bit more poking around showed that the problem was displayed whenever the CME made a callback to a service.

So what was going on? (Did I ask that already?)

It turned out that installing large portions of Sharepoint had had the undesired effect that the Tridion CME web site no longer owned the default binding. We had a host header binding mapped in IIS, and you could reach this just fine, but since the install, traffic aimed at 'localhost' was going to the wrong web site. Actually, Tridion has got this covered, because in the WebRoot Web.Config there's a an app setting called "Tridion.WCF.RedirectTo". This was pointing to localhost (which had worked fine when the server was first intalled). So when the CME tried to make calls back to the Model services, it was aiming these calls at localhost, which of course, ended up in the sharepoint site and a 404.

We fixed the immediate problem by editing the IIS bindings, but we're considering whether it might be good practice to always configure Tridion.WCF.RedirectTo to go to the name of your site, and not to localhost.

The relevant Tridion documentation is here,