Application Server Administration job failed for service instance Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchAdminSharedWebServiceInstance (6b98c51f-116c-49f0-9aa6-4207555ed2f8).

Reason: The handle is invalid.

Techinal Support Details:

System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException: The handle is invalid.
at System.Security.Cryptography.Utils.CreateProvHandle(CspParameters parameters, Boolean
andomKeyContainer)
at System.Security.Cryptography.Utils.GetKeyPairHelper(CspAlgorithmType keyType, CspParameters parameters, Boolean randomKeyContainer, Int32 dwKeySize, SafeProvHandle& safeProvHandle, SafeKeyHandle& safeKeyHandle)
at System.Security.Cryptography.RSACryptoServiceProvider.GetKeyPair()
at System.Security.Cryptography.RSACryptoServiceProvider..ctor(Int32 dwKeySize, CspParameters parameters, Boolean useDefaultKeySize)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.CertificateManager.CreateSelfSignedSslCertificate(CspParameters parameters, X500DistinguishedName name, DateTime expiresAfter)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPProvisioningAssistant.ProvisionIisWebSite(String serverComment, String[] serverBindings, String[] secureBindings, AuthenticationMethods authenticationMethods, String[] authenticationProviders, String path, AccessFlags accessFlags, String applicationName, String applicationPoolId, String[] scriptMaps, String sslCertificateSubjectName)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPMetabaseManager.ProvisionIisWebSite(String serverComment, String[] serverBindings, String[] secureBindings, Int32 authenticationMethods, String[] authenticationProviders, String path, Int32 accessFlags, String applicationName, String applicationPoolId, String[] scriptMaps, String sslCertificateSubjectName)
at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.SharedWebServiceInstance.Synchronize()
at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.ApplicationServerJob.ProvisionLocalSharedServiceInstances(Boolean isAdministrationServiceJob)
After some troubleshooting, googling and talking to the windows team I found that the folder:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys most likely had the wrong permissions. One of the files located in the folder didn’t seemed to like the move and when trying to look at the permissions I got this:

So, what I did was that I gave the ownership of this folder to the local administrators group which is done in the following way:

Click Ok on the warning that is shown above.

Click on Advanced and then on the Owner tab.

Select administrators, and click Ok until all windows are closed

Open up the security dialogue again and add the local administrators group and click ok. Note that if you have moved the server from one AD to another you will most likely see the old AD account in the security list which should be deleted.

You should add the local Administrator group to the MachineKeys folder above an make sure that it inherits the permissions.

This should solve the problem for you.

Now in the beginning there are a some prices that can be won if you just sign up. And why wouldn’t you, it’s free and you can win an iPad and other nice things!! If you have any questions on any of the topics, don’t hesitate to post them in the forum. The link to the site is www.secretsofsharepoint.com and to read the press release you can do that on Idera who is one of the main sponsors of the site. http://www.idera.com/News/?NewsCategory=0&ID=263

Besides from the book we have a couple of other interesting projects coming up during the autumn so stay tuned either on our blogs or through twitter.

Congrats Niklas!

Keep up to date with the event through the following channels.

Web site: http://www.sharepointconference.asia/ 
Linkedin: http://events.linkedin.com/SharePoint-Conference-South-East-Asia/pub/364552
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/SharePoint-Conference-South-East-Asia/135980859759693
Twitter: #SPCSEA @spcsea

/Mattias

By judging on the feedback from the two quite crowded sessions I held (one together with Niklas Goude) it seemed like they were appreciated which makes the long flight all worth it. The first session was about managing SharePoint 2010 using PowerShell and was much like the one we held on TechDays Sweden a couple of months back. The second session was quite different as it was not technical at all and was part of the “voice of the customer” track. The focus was on lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid when implementing SharePoint in global organizations. I referenced a large customer I have worked a lot with and compared two different environments, one quite standard and out of the box with huge amount of data and one very heavy customized. I then described the different challenges you might face on each and one of them.

After the New Zealand session I had a good talk around governance and things to consider when upgrading to a new version of SharePoint with Michael Sampson who’s clearly one of the experts on the topic. Michael has written a couple of books on the topic but I have not earlier been able to read any of them, until now. I got two of his books and have now completed the “SharePoint Roadmap for collaboration” and I can recommend it, it has a couple of good things in it even if it’s a bit out of date now when SharePoint 2010 is available.

There are usually a lot of preparations before your sessions which often means that you can’t attend all sessions even if you want. I did however get the chance to listen to a few of them and found Todd Bleeker’s REST and LINQ together with Steve Smith’s Service Application session in NZ very good.

Here in Sydney I got the chance to see Michael Noel & Aaron Saikovski two sessions; Virtualisation of SharePoint 2010 Farm Architecture, and SharePoint 2010 – In Depth Architecture and Design Planning.
What also was interesting to see was that since the conferences had two non-technical tracks (business and voice of the customer) it draws people from the business and if I’m not mistaken there were almost a 50-50 ratio which is really good. I think that the concept of community driven SharePoint conferences is really something that people want and need. In fact the Australian SharePoint conference for 2011 is already announced so keep up to date with the latest information on: http://www.sharepointconference.com.au and http://www.sharepointconference.co.nz

Considering that we had the warmest day of the year in Gotheburg we had quite a good amount of attendees including Wictor Wilenwho joined us from Stockholm. Next meeting in Gotheburg will be after the summer vacations, probably around September. But in Stockholm there will be one meeting already this week, and unfortunately for all of you that has not applied to attend it’s full house! (http://www.sharepointcommunity.se/events/sweden-sharepoint-user-group-2)

If you have topics, ideas or something to share on the coming meetings in Gothenburg, don’t hesitate to contact me or any of the others guys helping out co-ordinating this.

Below are the links that was requested after Thomas session.

MSDN – Querying Enterprise Search

MSDN – Customizing the Enterprise Search UI

TechNet – Fast Search for Sharepoint

TechNet – Optional Processing

TechNet – Pipeline Extensibility

So who is this book for? Well, it’s for everyone working on the administration side of SharePoint 2010. Yes, this is a book about powershell but it’s not a pure developer book. We will take it from the beginning and using real life scenarios we will build solutions using PowerShell to show the strengths it has and how important it will be for SharePoint admins to master.

If you want to keep up to date with our progress on writing the book and to get information and special deals you should register for our newsletter at www.sharepointandpowershell.com or why not check it out at Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0071747974/heme0f

Something for everyone – one of the few IT events that specifically reaches out to multiple audiences

• 20 sessions of end user/power user/business content including some great case studies including Telstra, Volvo and a number of Industry verticals such as finance,  insurance, legal and engineering
• 10 sessions of pure technical content for IT Pro, Administrators, Developers and Analysts
• Content is relevant to those using WSS, MOSS 2007, and new 2010 products

FREE Hosted SharePoint Server 2010 Site for EVERY delegate – thanks to Emantra – Hosted Solutions Australia you get to try out everything you learn AT the event and  for 3 months after – try 2010 first hand!

Hear from the best – International, Local, Microsoft, Industry Experts and Customers – see the Speakerlist and get to collaborate with hundreds of your fellow SharePoint enthusiasts – ask all your SharePoint questions!

Additional Training – Pre and Post event Get to the Point Training Workshops for intensive half day courses – an excellent chance to up skill in both 2007 and 2010 content.

Exhibitor area – Support our sponsors and see all the great products and talk to the experts – 5 gold, 9 silver and 7 bronze sponsors.

If you will be there. Let me know, I’m looking forward to meet you there. And if you’ll be there don’t miss my two sessions about SharePoint and PowerShell together with a more business focuses session in a “how we did it” approach.

There were a lot of sessions around SharePoint 2010 and it was a thrill seeing that almost all of them draw full houses.

Niklas and I had our session; SharePoint and PowerShell in real life and we got some very good feedback and it seamed to be very appreciated. Best of all was that all our live demos ran without any problems something that was not the case in many of the sessions I attended. If you attended the conference but missed our session the are now made available here: http://www.microsoft.com/sverige/techdays/recordedsessions.aspx

We also got the results from the speakers evaluation survey and we were in the top third of the 85 sessions. In fact we were the SharePoint session that got best results, which is very nice. This session was done in Swedish but in the Australian and New Zealand conference in June this session will be held in English and then we aim for even better result! Hope to see you there!

One of the cmdlets that needs to be used when scripting a 2010 farm using PowerShell is the Initialize-SPResourceSecurity This does the same as psconfig -cmd secureresources. A have used this hundreds of times and knows that it is, according to the technet command line reference  ”Performs SharePoint Products and Technologies resource security enforcement on the server. For example, security is enforced on files, folders, and registry keys”. Earlier I have been happy with that explanation since it’s quite obvious what it does right? But what does this really mean, what security is set and on what folders and files? It turns out that if you Google on it, everyone mentioning it says more or less the same as the sentence mentioned on Technet. This made me even more curios, and to find out you can actually run the command from the command line and get the result there or you can pipe it out to a txt file like this:

psconfig -cmd secureresources > c:\temp\secureresources.txt

The below is a copy of the result (Moss) and should give you a hint on what it actually does and what files, foldres and registry keys are affected.

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\LoadBalancerSettings’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘LocalService’ ‘Read’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\WebServices\Root’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘Users’ ‘Read, Execute’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\LoadBalancerSettings’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\VSS’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\LauncherSettings’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘LocalSystem’ ‘Read’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘WSS_WPG’ ‘Read, Execute’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\WebServices\Root’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘NetworkService’ ‘Read, Execute’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\WSS\Diagnostics’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0\Data\’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Diagnostics’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘Users’ ‘Read, Execute’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\WebServices’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘WSS_WPG’ ‘Read’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\APPID\{6002D29F-1366-4523-88C1-56D59BFEF8CB}’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\Logs\’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘C:\WINDOWS\System32\drivers\etc\HOSTS’ of type ‘File’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\Bin\’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘LocalService’ ‘Read, Execute’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\LauncherSettings’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\Logs’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘Users’ ‘Read, Execute, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\Logs\’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘WSS_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\WSS\ComponentsToRegister’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0\Data\Office Server\’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\APPID\{58F1D482-A132-4297-9B8A-F8E4E600CDF6}’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\Bin’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘Users’ ‘Read, Execute’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Setup’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘NetworkService’ ‘Read’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘C:\WINDOWS\Tasks’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\LoadBalancerSettings’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_WPG’ ‘Read’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0′ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_WPG’ ‘Read’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0′ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\WebServices’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Registration\{90120000-110D-0000-1000-0000000FF1CE}’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\LauncherSettings’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Read’ permissions .

Thanks for the tip Andrija!