Changing the Service Bus RunAs Account Password Changes VSS Credentials

Since I’ve been working in the area of Workflow Manager (WFM) as it relates to SharePoint and since WFM is ‘tied at the hip’, so to speak, to Service Bus one of my co-workers forwarded me some interesting information regarding Service Bus that I thought was worth letting you know about if if you didn’t already…

<wow, that was a long and I’m sure grammatically incorrect sentence>

Basically, my peer, Joe Rodgers, is a powershell nut and uses it for everything. He was writing some scripts for one of his customers and noticed that when he changes the password for his Service Bus RunAs account, that the credentials for the Service Bus VSS service also change to match that RunAs account. Initially when you configure SB along with WFM for SharePoint, the Service Bus VSS service is configured to use LocalSystem.

Before the change:

 

The script used:

 

After the change:

Notice that the script doesn’t mention the account name, but what happens is in the code for setting the password of the SB RunAs account it also takes those credentials and sets them on the Service Bus VSS service.

I don’t expect this to affect many of us, but it’s possible that this will affect you if you are using some product that hooks into the VSS writers.