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Archives for September 2012

Recovering Passwords for SharePoint 2010 Farm, Web Application and Service Application Accounts

September 22, 2012 by Joel Jeffery

Ever lost your Farm password?

Farm Password Recovery in SharePoint 2010

The other day I was asked by a customer, “hey, would you happen to have a copy of our Farm password anywhere?”

No, I didn’t. And it would kind of be bad if I did!

However, I could recover SPFarm passwords and recover other Application Pool account passwords for them, once Remote Desktopped in to one of the SharePoint servers.

If you want to recover the Farm password, you need to sign in with a Local Administrator account on a server running Central Admin.

If you want to recover one of the Web Application or Service Application passwords, then you need to log in to one of those servers instead.

IIS 7.x runs Central Admin in the context of an Application Pool running under the Farm Account credentials. Similarly, Web Applications and Service Applications run in App Pools with their own credentials.

To recover any of these, start up an Administrative command prompt or PowerShell window, and IIS Manager 7.x.

In IIS Manager, you need to find out the name of the Application Pool.

IIS Showing Application Pools

For Central Admin, that would be:

SharePoint Central Administration v4

But we can also uncover the passwords for other Application Pools, e.g.:

SharePoint – 80

SharePoint Web Applications

e4b4b94050634ad2863ad7d7d17c3a17

Next, at the command prompt (or PowerShell) you can use the IIS appcmd.exe to request the Password field from the ProcessModel section of the applicationHost.config file. For example, in PowerShell (on ONE LINE!):

&$env:windir\\system32\\inetsrv\\appcmd.exe list apppool 
 "SharePoint Central Administration v4" /text:ProcessModel.Password

An example run is shown below:

Extracting Passwords for Application Pools in IIS

Hope this helps someone!

Filed Under: SharePoint 2010 Tagged With: PowerShell, SharePoint, SharePoint Administration

SharePoint Documentation Kit (SPDocKit)

September 4, 2012 by Joel Jeffery

I need to tell you about something fantastic.

SharePoint Documentation Kit – SPDocKit Review

I’ve been using SPDocKit from Acceleratio for about 6 months now, on and off. One of the services we offer at JFDI Phoenix is our SharePoint 2010 Farm Health Check, and this involves a lot of boring navigation through Central Admin and some gnarly PowerShell to gather farm insight. Collecting settings information by hand is tough and time consuming.

The value-add for customers comes from what I can deduce from their configuration – what problems they’ll see; whether their platform will scale; whether it will be secure enough.

SPDocKit helps me gather the vast majority of the information I need, and formats it into a very detailed, very useful report in Word format.

Here’s just a snippet from the table of contents:

SPDocKit Table of Contents

It goes on to produce a detailed inventory of each server in the farm:

Farm Overview

It even builds a Visio-style diagram showing the farm topology. OK, I know it looks daft when I run it on a one-server farm, but it is vastly more impressive on a multi-server farm!

Farm Topology

It also identifies and lists:

  • Services on server, per server
  • Site topology (site collections per web application)
  • Web applications
  • Self-service site creation settings
  • Alternate access mappings
  • IIS settings
  • Site collection usage
  • Quota templates
  • Service applications
  • Detailed settings for each application
  • Databases used
  • Permissions
  • Associations to web applications and proxy groups
  • Content databases, usage and quotas
  • System settings, including email and SMS settings
  • Features and solutions
  • Sandbox configuration
  • Monitoring and reporting
  • Security
  • Administrators
  • Managed accounts
  • Service accounts
  • Products and versions
  • Scheduled tasks
  • Server information
  • Hardware / cores
  • Installed programs and hotfixes
  • Drives and free space

If this wasn’t enough, it also lets you record all this information and monitor changes over time.

More Features!

And there’s more! The SPDocKit application itself has a pretty useful UI. You can browse the web application and site structure without needing to generate documentation:

Site Explorer

It also lets you walk the permissions of your sites. Very useful if you’ve been breaking inheritance and you want to know who has access to what. Having said that, SharePoint’s built-in “Check Effective Permissions” button is still invaluable to debugging permissions problems.

Permssions Explorer

There’s also a Detailed Permissions report, but this is still a very interactive tool:

Detailed Permissions

There’s even best practices analysis built in:

Best Practices

Although obviously not exhaustive, it does give a very good start for a more detailed analysis of a farm.

There’s also a Scheduled Tasks viewer:

Scheduled Tasks

Conclusion

Whilst SPDocKit is not magic, it certainly saves me a great deal of time on SharePoint farm health checks. The licensing is pretty cool also. You can either buy it for an individual farm, of have a yearly subscription as a consultant. If you’re using the latter, the setup exe lets you run it on a server without leaving it installed afterwards.

Filed Under: SharePoint 2010 Tagged With: SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Administration, SharePoint Architecture

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Joel is a full-stack cloud architect who codes. He is a Microsoft Certified SharePoint Online, SharePoint Server and Azure specialist and Microsoft Certified Trainer.
He has over 20 years' experience with SharePoint and the Microsoft .NET Framework.
He's also co-founder of Microsoft Gold Partner JFDI Consulting Ltd. Read More…

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