Setting up single signon was far more difficult than you are lead to believe by the very simple management page in central admin.
Doing a typical male thing (as my wife would comment), I jumped straight in and said "hey I don't need no stinking instructions and definately no help guides!". So, as usual, I was wrong. (My wife would say that too).
So after some googling I found a great post about setting up single signon here: http://www.wssdemo.com/...
However I did have a couple of other problems on the Manage Server Settings for Single Sign-On page:
- You do not have the rights to perform this operation.
- Failed to connect to the database server. Verify connectivity and rights for the configuration account and try again.
Solutions:
You do not have the rights to perform this operation.
It is saying that you as an administrator does not have permission to do this. To get past this error you have to launch IE with the RunAs command and run it under the domain account you have setup for the single sign on service.
Failed to connect to the database server. Verify connectivity and rights for the configuration account and try again
This error occurred because during my clicking frenzy when things weren't working I manually created a database called SSO in between the curses and muttering. Then I got a warning "the database already exists". So great I go and delete the database from SQL Server, forgetting a simple little fact that the .mdf and .ldf files are not deleted also. It turns out the error is sharepoint trying to create the SSO database when the files are still on the disk. So, easiest way, just change the database name or if you want to exercise your clicking finger a few more times, browse to where sql server keeps the mdf and ldf file and delete them.
There is an msdn post on it here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/944104