STS Security Token Service on SharePoint 2013

Today I was bringing my stepping server back up. In this case I use it to upgrade content databases from 2010 -> 2016.

Since you can’t directly upgrade, since the config data had been wiped, I was going through the config wizard to get it rebuilt. Now the wizard will complain if the old website still exists. So for some reason I decided to remove all the old sites and app pools. figured it would get rebuilt.

Now the wizard completed without a hitch, and I was off creating a web app and some content databases to delete as I’d test and mount the 2010 content databases for staging.

Oddly after I had mounted the database I had noticed the server was failing to successfully call “Get-SPSite”, saying that it was due to the security token store service. There’s lots of links out there with similiar issues… such as this, this, this, this and even this …. most of which are dead ends.

There’s MS support page on this as well, however I may have accidentally deleted that App Pool…

Then I stumbled across this, a MS blog post, which I find a lil more useful usually cause they are more hands on… in this case since I was already hooped I gave the command a try, and it ran just like his…

I wasn’t sure if this was enough, then I found this and ran these commands as well…

$sts = Get-SPServiceApplication | ?{$_ -match "Security"}
$sts.Status
$sts.Provision()

after a reboot, all of a sudden Get-SPSite was working again!