Do you want to publish your SharePoint intranet or internet site to your users with a nice friendly url (or hostheader)?

This article can be also used if you want to rename your web application.

You would have to change the Alternate Access Mappings in SharePoint.

In SharePoint Central Administration, Click Operations.
In Operations, under the Global Configuration area, click Alternate access mappings

Next to Alternate Access Mapping Collection, click on the down arrow and click on ‘Change Alternate Access Mapping Collection’.

Select your Web Application

Click on Edit Public URLs

Then type in your desired URL (hostheader) in the Internet field as shown below:
For Example: http://www.mysite.com

Alternatively, you can change the Intranet fields for SharePoint intranet deployments.

Click Save and youre done!

But before you go, make sure your DNS resolves to your web server IP address. Ping and make sure that works. You could also modify your hosts file to test this out.

You have now successfully enabled SharePoint to resolve requests to your new URL.

Using the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard, it may appear to be impossible to get past the DOMAIN\User_Name as required in the wizard.

If you havent installed SharePoint yet, then you should not select to open the configuration wizard.
You need to just click ‘close’.

If you have installed SharePoint and not yet run the configuration Wizard, then you will see this message when you click on Central Administration.
See example:

Now to connect specify an SQL account instead of a DOMAIN\User_Name account, you would have to close the Wizard and perform the following steps:

Manually create four databases in your SQL server with the following settings:
Database Name: (see examples below)
Collation: Latin1_General_CI_AS_KS_WS

Database Name examples:
SharePoint_Config (SharePoint Configuration)
SharePoint_AdminContent (SharePoint Admin Contents)
SharePoint_SSP_DB (Shared Services)
SharePoint_SSP_Search_DB (Shared Services Search)

(Note: SSP – Shared Services Provider)

Create your SQL user account and assign permissions as dbo on the above databases

Now search for a file called PSConfig.exe
It should be found in:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN

Open a command prompt and go to the directory where the PSConfig.exe file resides.

Ready for the fun stuff?
Run this command to create your new SharePoint farm and connect it via a SQL account.

PSConfig -cmd configdb -create -server (Database server name) -database (Database name) -user (Farm Administrators domain account) –password (Farm Administrators password) -dbuser (Newly created SQL username) –dbpassword (SQL password) –admincontentdatabase (Admin Content Database name)

You should see a success message. If not, then I would suggest you to recheck your SQL permissions and Farm Administrators permissions. PSConfig will spit out other errors if its anything else.

PSConfig arguments explained:

create: Creates a new configuration database and thus establishes a new server farm. If this server is already connected to a configuration database, the server will be disconnected first, then the new configuration database will be created.

server: The SQL server where the configuration database is located.
database: The configuration database name.
dbuser: The SQL server user name used for SQL authentication.
dbpassword: The SQL server password used for SQL authentication.
user: Server farm administrator user account.
password: Server farm administrator user account password.
admincontentdatabase: The Central Administration Web Application content database name.

You would have to resume the Configuration Wizard.
Go to Start > All Programs > Microsoft Office Server > SharePoint configuration Wizard. The wizard should have detected that the configuration database has already been created.

Don’t disconnect from the server farm, unless you want to recreate the database again.

You should now use your SQL Authentication to any other databases you want to configure such as the SSP and the Search Database.

To add more servers such as Web Front End servers to the SharePoint farm, then you have to go through all the above steps, except run this PSConfig command from the command prompt:

PSConfig -cmd configdb -connect -server (Database server name) -database (Database name) -user (Farm Administrators domain account) –password (Farm Administrators password) -dbuser (Newly created SQL username) –dbpassword (SQL password) –admincontentdatabase (Admin Content Database name)

Argument explained:
connect: Connects to an existing configuration database and thus joins this server to an existing server farm. If this server is already connected to a configuration database, the server will be disconnected first, then connected to the existing configuration database.

And youre done! You now have a SharePoint farm running off SQL logins.