Advice January

Configure Managed Accounts Error

Object reference not set to an instance of an object

I was building a SharePoint 2010 Foundation environment and chose the standalone option. By doing this it installed SQL express and set up Central admin and created the web application and the 1^st site collection for me (I did answer a few questions to get there but that is a different story). I went in to Central administration and started to setup some managed accounts so I could secure the system. When I created the first of my managed accounts I received an error that it could not set the password policy on that account. That is when I remembered that I had not changed the farm account from Network Service (the default for the install I choose) to a domain account. I set the farm account to be run under a domain account that had all the necessary permissions and then went back to the page in Central Administration to configure managed accounts. This is where the problem started, when I clicked on the page I got the error “Object reference not set to an instance of an object”. I was a bit confused and did some checking around and found that the first managed account I created and set to change password and got that error was my problem. I now had to set that account to turn off the automatic password settings. Because I could not access this from Central Administration I had to use the SharePoint Management Shell to complete this. Below is are the commands needed to get this fixed

Find which managed accounts have automatic password change set

Get-SPManagedAccount | where {$_.AutomaticChange –eq $true}

                  This should return all the accounts that are set to automatic password change

Create a variable to hold the account in question

$account = get-SPManagedAccount –identity “domain\account”

Verify your variable to make sure it returns the account

$account

Change the automatic password change parameter

$account.AutomaticChange=$false

Update the information

$account.Update(0)

If there is more than 1 account then repeat this for each account in question.

Now you can go back to Central Administration and access the page.