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 1st 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.
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