STSADM error message

Symptom:
"The Web application at 'http://yourserver:port/Approval Requests' could not be found. Verify that you have typed the URL correctly. If the URL should be serving existing content, the system administrator may need to add a new request URL mapping to the intended application."

Reason:
Apparently Sharepoint gives this error message if you try to run stsadm remotely. There are lots more cases when you will get same message, this is just one.

Solution:
1) run command locally.
2)Alternatively run command using psexec. Just create a batch file with the stsadm command to execute. Then execute the batch file with psexec with a administrator user id and password.


Example: copy following line to delete.bat file

stsadm.exe -o gl-deletelistitem -url "http://yourserver:port/Approval Requests"


Above line uses powershell command to delete all contents of a list 'Approval Requests'. You can download powershell from http://stsadm.blogspot.com/2009/02/downloads.html.


Then run following command from any workstation to execute above batch file remotely to sharepoint server.


psexec.exe \\sharepointServer -u yourdomain\sharepointAdmin -p password C:\batchfilelocation\delete.bat'

yourdomain\sharepointAdmin should also an administrator to the sharepoint database.