How Specify Application Pool and Identity When Creating Central Admin

Question

I notice when executing the cmdlet New-SPCentralAdministration I am not able to specify the app pool name or its identity. What happens is the the cmdlet creates a new application pool with the undesirable guid name. Furthermore the Identity of the app pool is set to the farm administrator account. It appears the New-SPCentralAdministration cmdlet needs some enhancements to accommodate those types of configurations so what powershell commands or approaches should be taken to handle them?

Answer 1

There are very good reasons why you cannot control how the app pool for the CA site is created. Don't even try to mess with this. Your CA site MUST run as the Farm Account - this is non-negotiable.

Answer 2

Regarding the app pool name, my central admin app pool is called:

SharePoint Central Administration v4

which is defined by the constant

Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPConstants.AdminSiteName

The calls for creating a central admin site eventually get to this method

SPAdministrationWebApplication.CreateDefaultInstance(SqlConnectionStringBuilder administrationContentDatabase, 
        SPWebService adminService, IdentityType identityType, 
        string farmUser, SecureString farmPassword)

So i don't think there is anyway to change that. Are you sure the GUID named app pool on is for central admin? It may have been assign by someone playing in IIS?

And then regarding the identity of central admin app pool, by looking at the code, i would say that it should stay as the sharepoint farm account. If you look at the page for configuring the service accounts, the central admin app pool is not one of them, but the farm account is

http://xyz:8080/_admin/FarmCredentialManagement.aspx

When you install sharepoint you should have at least two accounts,

• farm account
• This is the account central admin and the timer will run under
• You should never log in with this account
• farm admin account
• you should log onto the sharepoint server with this account
• and you should never add this account to any of the service/managed accounts

New-SPCentralAdministration uses the farm account to provision central admin.

You say

Furthermore the Identity of the app pool is set to the farm administrator account

I think you have got your accounts mixed up or you are only using one account to do two jobs.