Suddenly getting “The local farm is not accessible. Cmdlets with FeatureDependencyId are not registered.”

Question

This morning all the development machines at the company I work at, couldn't manage SharePoint through Powershell. We were all getting the annoying "The local farm is not accessible. Cmdlets with FeatureDependencyId are not registered." error.

A quick search has given me two causes for this error.

1: Wrong rights set for the user on the Config DB in SQL

2: Not running the Management Shell as Administrator

Neither of these two are the problem, since nothing has changed.

Answer 1

Turns out the problem was caused by our wonderful operations guys ok'ing a windows update on our development machines.

The update in question is: Windows Management Framework 3.0 for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1

This update updates Powershell to a new version that uses .NET 4.xx and is not compatible with SharePoint 2010 resulting in the error described in the question.

There are two possible solutions.

1. Add "-version 2" without the quotes to your Management shell link, to force running as an older version.
2. Remove the update if you have no use for it, for other purposes.

So if you sudenly get this error on a server that has been running fine, check your Windows Updates.

Answer 2

I updated target in my run command to look like this:

C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\PowerShell.exe -version 2 -NoExit " & ' C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\CONFIG\POWERSHELL\Registration\sharepoint.ps1 ' "

Answer 3

I came across this issue too today, here is the solution - http://blogs.technet.com/b/meamcs/archive/2013/02/18/sharepoint-powershell-command-problem-featuredependencyid-are-not-registered.aspx

You can alternatively open the SharePoint Management Shell as a user that does have Shell access to the SharePoint config DB and then run the command Add-SPShellAdmin DOMAIN\Username of the user that needs shell access.