We have a SharePoint 2013 farm on a Windows 2008 R2 server. Recently we found this error in the Windows event logs in relation with the web application pool account:
Event ID 1511 – Windows cannot find the local profile and is logging you on with a temporary profile. Changes you make to this profile will be lost when you log off.
We tried to solve the issue based on the information we found in this post, but at the step below we faced the problem, that the password stored for the web application pool account (in this case we assumed domain\wa_pool_account) in our password repository does not work any more.
runas /u:domain\wa_pool_account /profile cmd
The web application pool account is registered as a managed account in SharePoint, at the original password has been already automatically changed by the system.
We could reset the password for the managed account as described in this article, but before changing the password I wanted to be sure there is no way to recover the current password from the system. I found a blog post and the related PowerShell code in TechNet Gallery, but I found the method described there (creating a new web application, and using an external tool, appcmd.exe) a bit overkill.
Instead of this I came up with an alternative solution that query the password directly from the SPManagedAccount object, via its private m_Password field (of type SPEncryptedString) that we can access by using Reflection. The public SecureStringValue property of the SPEncryptedString class returns an instance of the System.Security.SecureString class, and as illustrated here, we can “decode” its value to a simple string via Marshaling.
Using this approach, recovering the managed account password is so simple:
$ma = Get-SPManagedAccount domain\wa_pool_account
$maType = $ma.GetType()
$bindingFlags = [Reflection.BindingFlags]::NonPublic -bor [Reflection.BindingFlags]::Instance
$m_Password = $maType.GetField("m_Password", $bindingFlags)
$pwdEnc = $m_Password.GetValue($ma)
$ssv = $pwdEnc.SecureStringValue
$ptr = [System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::SecureStringToGlobalAllocUnicode($ssv)
[System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::PtrToStringUni($ptr)
