WSS 2.0 : The server instance specified was not found. Please specify the server's address and port.

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Consider the following scenario. You enabled SSL for your SharePoint Site. You pass a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) name to a SPSite object. You use the SPWeb object to retrieve a property/call a method in Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 2.0, you may receive the following error message:

"The server instance specified was not found. Please specify the server's address and port.”

In Stsadm.exe or any executable, WSS only uses the Internet Information Services (IIS) metabase to figure out the IIS instance for a given URL. For Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), the IIS metabase only contains IP and port information, and there is no host-header or fully qualified domain name information. For example, if you try to use

SPWeb web = new SPSite(https://user.domain.microsoft.com).OpenWeb();

web.Files.Add(“<File Path>”);

 you cannot find the IIS instance because user.domain.microsoft.com is not in the SSL entry in the IIS metabase.

To resolve this issue, use IP address or computer name instead of the fully qualified domain name (FQDN). For example:

SPWeb web = new SPSite("https://172.26.232.190").OpenWeb();

web.Files.Add(“<File Path>”);