Look alive. Here comes a buzzard.

Hey - we’ve all made mistakes.  We all know that “oh sh**” moment right after we realize what we’ve done.  Often times this occurs right after we click a friendly “Are you sure??” dialog.  Of course I’m sure - if I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t have chosen to do it in the first place!  Stupid computer.

Anyway, I recently had a situation where someone (honestly, in this case it wasn’t me) accidentally deleted the Site Collection for the SSP admin site (/ssp/admin).  Since this was for a SharePoint farm in production I really didn’t want to have to re-create the entire SSP but I couldn’t figure out how to just re-create the site collection itself.  I figured there had to be a site template for the site but since it didn’t show up in the Create Site Collection UI I went and looked on disk.  Sure enough, a site template exists for the SSP Admin site.  It’s called OSRV.

So to create a new SSP admin site, run this command line.

stsadm.exe -o createsite -url http://<server>:<ssp_port>/ssp/admin -owneremail <email address> -ownerlogin <account> -sitetemplate OSRV#0 -title "Shared Services Administration: <your ssp name>"

This might take a little while to complete, but it does eventually finish.

Next you need to edit the SSP to point to the recreated site.

stsadm.exe -o editssp -title "<your ssp name>" -sspadminsite http://<server>:<ssp_port>/ssp/admin

That’s it.  You should be back up and running.