Local administrator privilege is required to update the Farm Administrators' group

Question

I perform an upgrade of SP from WSS SP2 to SPF 2010 SP1.

In WSS SP2, I was able to update the farm administrators. In SPF 2010 SP1, I keep receicing the following in the ULS logs:

Local administrator privilege is required to update the Farm Administrators' group.

• I have tried multiple accounts. All with the same error message.
• I have also ran the updatefarmcredentials command. Still same error.

Update:

I was able to resolve this issue after running the SP Products Configuration Wizard several times.

Also, currently MS does not support installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows Server 2012. These issues I am noticing could be the result of unsupported environment.

Update: MS is now saying the installation of SharePoint 2010 on Windows Server 2012 will be supported once SP 2010 SP2 is released. Reference

Answer 1

I had the same problem when running IE on the server and opening the Central Admin URL. Went to all Programs/Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products/SharePoint 2010 Central Administration and ran that as an Administrator and had no problems adding users.

I was also able to add users when I used a workstation to add users via the URL.

Answer 2

SP2013 and 2012 Server: I have noticed that if I start CA via browser, it won't give me add Farm Administrators with the error:Local administrator privilege is required to update the Farm Administrators' group. Even though I use a farm account. To resolve the issue make sure that you start Central Administration from start menu.

Answer 3

I had this problem trying to add a Farm Admin to a new SharePoint Server 2010 Trial Version on Windows 2008r2. Without going too far down the avenues suggested above, I found a PowerShell script over here that does the heavy lifting, reproduced below. I ran this from a SharePoint 2010 Management Shell run as administrator (may not be necessary to run with elevated permissions).

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -erroraction SilentlyContinue

# Creates a new Farm Administrator
$newFarmAdministrator = Read-Host -Prompt 'Please provide the name of the new Farm Administrator in the form of DOMAIN\Username'

$caWebApp = Get-SPWebApplication -IncludeCentralAdministration | where-object {$_.DisplayName -eq "SharePoint Central Administration v4"}
$caSite = $caWebApp.Sites[0]
$caWeb = $caSite.RootWeb

$farmAdministrators = $caWeb.SiteGroups["Farm Administrators"]
$farmAdministrators.AddUser($newFarmAdministrator, "", $newFarmAdministrator, "Configured via PowerShell")

$caWeb.Dispose()
$caSite.Dispose()

$caDB = Get-SPContentDatabase -WebApplication $caWebApp
Add-SPShellAdmin -Database $caDB -Username $newFarmAdministrator