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.

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:

Hope this helps someone!

#spthingaday

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#spthingaday 003 - Information Architecture. Folders are evil. Use metadata. #SharePoint, #Office365..
On a fileshare, all you have is path and filename. That's the only axis by which you can classify your stuff. So you nest folders, within folders, within folders. Then you pack the filename with extra bits of information - like the initials of the last editor, or the version number.
You don't need to do this in SharePoint. Use metadata.
Add columns to your libraries. Text columns, number columns, choice columns, managed metadata columns. Each file can have several of these values simultaneously. But a file can only live in one folder at a time.
Use metadata.

#microsoft #microsoftoffice #microsoftsharepoint #microsofttraining #officetraining #freetraining #trainingvideos #contentmanagement #enterprisecontentmanagement

#spthingaday 003 - Information Architecture. Folders are evil. Use metadata. #SharePoint, #Office365..
On a fileshare, all you have is path and filename. That's the only axis by which you can classify your stuff. So you nest folders, within folders, within folders. Then you pack the filename with extra bits of information - like the initials of the last editor, or the version number.
You don't need to do this in SharePoint. Use metadata.
Add columns to your libraries. Text columns, number columns, choice columns, managed metadata columns. Each file can have several of these values simultaneously. But a file can only live in one folder at a time.
Use metadata.

#microsoft #microsoftoffice #microsoftsharepoint #microsofttraining #officetraining #freetraining #trainingvideos #contentmanagement #enterprisecontentmanagement ...

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#spthingaday 056 - How-To. Customise Modern Edit and Display Forms. #SharePointOnline, #Office365, #HowTo, #PowerUser, #PowerApps.. If you've ever wanted to customise the Display and Edit forms in a Modern Library in SharePoint Online, you now have the ability to do just that.

You don't even need to be a developer.
Showing or hiding form fields is now a very straightforward matter.

Go to the List or Library of your choice. In the Toolbar - where the Ribbon used to be - select PowerApps, and then "Customize forms." This will load the PowerApps browser tool, and build a custom form for you.

The first thing it asks is whether you would like to show/hide or reorder fields.

Selecting yes will give you a list of available fields for you to show or hide or reorder.

Once you're done, hit Save and then Publish.

When PowerApps is ready, you can go back to your List or Library and try it out.

#microsoft #microsoftoffice #microsoftsharepoint #microsofttraining #officetraining #freetraining #trainingvideos #contentmanagement #enterprisecontentmanagement

#spthingaday 056 - How-To. Customise Modern Edit and Display Forms. #SharePointOnline, #Office365, #HowTo, #PowerUser, #PowerApps.. If you've ever wanted to customise the Display and Edit forms in a Modern Library in SharePoint Online, you now have the ability to do just that.

You don't even need to be a developer.
Showing or hiding form fields is now a very straightforward matter.

Go to the List or Library of your choice. In the Toolbar - where the Ribbon used to be - select PowerApps, and then "Customize forms." This will load the PowerApps browser tool, and build a custom form for you.

The first thing it asks is whether you would like to show/hide or reorder fields.

Selecting yes will give you a list of available fields for you to show or hide or reorder.

Once you're done, hit Save and then Publish.

When PowerApps is ready, you can go back to your List or Library and try it out.

#microsoft #microsoftoffice #microsoftsharepoint #microsofttraining #officetraining #freetraining #trainingvideos #contentmanagement #enterprisecontentmanagement ...

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#spthingaday 060 - SharePoint Search. Changing the Search Topology. #SharePoint, #SharePointSearch.. The Search Service in SharePoint on-premise is made up of six components.

Crawl, Content Processing, Index, Analytics, Query and Administration.

Each of these components can be placed on one or more servers in your Farm.

To make any one Search component support high availability, you need to make sure there are at least two servers in your Farm running it.

SharePoint Server 2010 had only 3 types of component, and Microsoft let you manage their placement via Central Admin, in the browser.

From SharePoint 2013 onwards, this was deemed too difficult to express graphically.

For SharePoint 2013 and 2016, topology changes need to be made via PowerShell.

Tomorrow, we'll look at just what PowerShell cmd-lets you need to use.

#microsoft #microsoftoffice #microsoftsharepoint #microsofttraining #officetraining #freetraining #trainingvideos #contentmanagement #enterprisecontentmanagement

#spthingaday 060 - SharePoint Search. Changing the Search Topology. #SharePoint, #SharePointSearch.. The Search Service in SharePoint on-premise is made up of six components.

Crawl, Content Processing, Index, Analytics, Query and Administration.

Each of these components can be placed on one or more servers in your Farm.

To make any one Search component support high availability, you need to make sure there are at least two servers in your Farm running it.

SharePoint Server 2010 had only 3 types of component, and Microsoft let you manage their placement via Central Admin, in the browser.

From SharePoint 2013 onwards, this was deemed too difficult to express graphically.

For SharePoint 2013 and 2016, topology changes need to be made via PowerShell.

Tomorrow, we'll look at just what PowerShell cmd-lets you need to use.

#microsoft #microsoftoffice #microsoftsharepoint #microsofttraining #officetraining #freetraining #trainingvideos #contentmanagement #enterprisecontentmanagement ...

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