It may become necessary to reconfigure your SharePoint service accounts. This was the case when implementing our development portal. There are several steps involved, depending on what is being changed.
Application Pool Service Accounts
- Open Central Administration
- Click the Operations tab
- Under Security Configuration, click Service Accounts
- Click "Web Application Pool"
- For Web Service, select "Windows SharePoint Services Web Application"
- For Application Pool, select the pool for which you will be changing credentials
- Under "Select an account for this component", ensure Configurable is selected, then enter the new user name and password
- Click OK
- Open a command prompt on the Central Administration server and execute "iisreset /noforce"
Search Service Account
- Open Central Administration
- Click the Application Management tab
- Under Search, click Manage Search Service
- Under Query and Index Servers, locate and click the first Search Service
- Enter the new user name and password
- Click OK
- If there are multiple search servers, repeat for each Search Service.
SSP Service Account
- Open Central Administration
- Click the Application Management tab
- On the left hand side, locate and click Shared Services Administration
- Highlight the SSP name and click the drop down arrow
- Click Edit Properties
- Enter the new user name and password
- Click OK
Farm Account
- Open a command prompt on the machine running Central Administration
- Navigate to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN
- Enter "stsadm -o updatefarmcredentials -userlogin domain\user -password newpassword
- Execute "iisreset /noforce"
IMPORTANT: When changing the farm credentials, ensure that the new farm account is placed into the Farm Administrators group (Central Administration -> Operations -> Security Configuration -> Update farm administrators group). Also ensure that the new farm account is correctly added as a database owner to all MOSS databasees. From my personal experience, the new farm account was NOT added to all MOSS databases which caused all kinds of errors until I corrected the SQL permissions.
