After changing the password at Active Directory, I changed the farm admin password in application pools and services (under services.msc) wherever farm admin account is used.
when I ran stsadm -o updatefarmcredentials command to change the farm admin password, i got the following error:
Value cannot be null
Parameter name: farm
Even after we run the stsadm command and change the password of other accounts, we have to manually restart user profiles and search service applications and others if any service is stopped.
To avoid multiple challenges and errors, below steps and command would make your life easier in less than 10 minutes:
- Change the password in Active Directly for all accounts (spFarmAdmin, spAdmin, spServiceAccount, spUserProfileAcct, spSearchAcct, etc).
- Run this command for each account as this command forces the password change in all application pools, services and service applications.
Set-SPManagedAccount -identity domain\SPFARMADMIN -ExistingPassword (Convertto-Securestring “P@ssword” -AsPlainText -Force)
Set-SPManagedAccount -identity domain\SPADMIN -ExistingPassword (Convertto-Securestring “P@ssword” -AsPlainText -Force)
Note: Setting automate password change at SharePoint Central admin is not recommended as SharePoint will create its own password for each account and update the AD and SharePoint. If the server login account is same as farm admin or spadmin, we will not able to login as we wont get the default password set by SharePoint.