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Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Teams and Office 365 Architecture, Development, Administration and Training

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

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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!

Automatically Generating Thesaurus Files from Taxonomy for SharePoint Search

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A while ago, a student of mine asked if it was possible to use the taxonomic alternative labels from the Managed Metadata Service as thesaurus items in SharePoint Server Search.

There’s no built-in way to do this, but it is possible to generate the required Xml with a little PowerShell.

The Concept

The Term Store contains Term Group, which content Term Sets, which in turn contain nested Terms. Each Term can have (optional) synonyms called Labels.

If we find all the Terms with Labels, we can write them out in the correct format as a chunk of Xml, and pipe it into a thesaurus file.

Thesaurus files for SharePoint Server Search are kept under the file path:

%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0\Data\Office Server\Applications\GUID-query-0\Config

A sample thesaurus file is shown below:

<XML ID="Microsoft Search Thesaurus">
    <thesaurus xmlns="x-schema:tsSchema.xml">
        <diacritics_sensitive>0</diacritics_sensitive>
        <expansion>
            <sub>Internet Explorer</sub>
            <sub>IE</sub>
            <sub>IE8</sub>
        </expansion>
        <replacement>
            <pat>NT5</pat>
            <pat>W2K</pat>
            <sub>Windows 2000</sub>
        </replacement>
    </thesaurus>
</XML>

You can see the rationale for how this file works on and how to manage thesaurus files at TechNet.

The Script

The script below shows the principle. It iterates over the Terms in each Term Store and finds their Labels. Where the Label is not the same as the name of the Term itself, it represents a synonym and we add it to the Xml.

function Extract-SPThesaurusFromTermLabels
{
  param([string] $webUrl);
  $ts = Get-SPTaxonomySession -Site $webUrl;
  Write-Output "<XML ID='Microsoft Search Thesaurus'>"; 
  Write-Output "<thesaurus xmlns='x-schema:tsSchema.xml'>"; 
  $ts.TermStores | 
  % { $_.Groups | 
    % { $_.TermSets | 
      % { $_.Terms | 
        % { $_.Labels | 
          ? {$_.Term.Name -ne $_.Value} |
          % { 
            Write-Output ("<expansion><sub>" + $_.Term.Name + 
              "</sub><sub>" + $_.Value + "</sub><expansion>");
          } 
        } 
      } 
    } 
  }; 
  Write-Output "</thesaurus>"; 
  Write-Output "</XML>";
}

You can then pipe the output of this command to an Xml file, and optionally use this in the place of your existing Thesaurus file with something like this:

Extract-SPThesaurusFromTermLabels http://sharepoint > tsLANG.xml

As always, please back up your original Thesaurus files and check the output of this before you use it! Smile