Hello all

I want to create an IIS6 application pool using powershell and the Microsoft.Sharepoint.Administration namespace. Everytime I want to set the password for the Application pool Identity I get an error: "Object reference not set to an instance of an object"

Does somebody know what I am doing wrong? I use the following lines of code to try to accomplish this:

$app = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPApplicationPool

$app.currentIdentitytype = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.IdentityType]::SpecificUser

$app.name = "test"

$app.username = "winadmin" $password = read-host "Enter a Password:" -assecurestring

$app.password = $password 

$app.provision()

Can somebody help me out or does somebody know another good powershell way of creating an IIS6 application pool?

Thanks a lot.

Regards,

Martijn

Martijn,

In looking at the MSDN docs, it appears that $app.password is looking for a string, not a SecureString. There are three ways you can do this. You could replace:
$app.username = "winadmin" $password = read-host "Enter a Password:" -assecurestring
with:
$credential = Get-Credential -Credential "winadmin"
$app.username = $credential.username
$app.password = $credential.GetNetworkCredential().Password #This returns the password to cleartext

or you could:
$app.username = "winadmin" $password = read-host "Enter a Password:" -assecurestring
$app.password = (New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential $app.username, $password).GetNetworkCredential().Password
#which essentially does the same thing.

finally, you could:
$app.password = [Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]:trToStringAuto([Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::SecureStringToBSTR($password))
#which is a bit more difficult to understand, in my opinion

Of the three, the first is the easiest and makes best use of the cmdlet. Hope this helps!

Hi Steven,

thanks for your reply. I tried all three options but unfortunately I get the same error message every time.

_{Exception setting "Password": "Object reference not set to an instance of an object"}

 

Do you have some more suggestions?

 

Regards,

Martijn