Creating the secure store service master key fails

Question

I have some powershell to create a farm including the secure store service. The code is pretty straight forward:

Update-SPSecureStoreMasterKey -ServiceApplicationProxy $id -Passphrase $passphrase

I dont get any errors but when I then try to create an application server key, thus:

Update-SPSecureStoreApplicationServerKey -ServiceApplicationProxy $id -Passphrase $passphrase

it fails and tells me the master key is not found:

Update-SPSecureStoreApplicationServerKey : Master secret key is not present in the database.

The thing is, this doesnt always fail. It's seems rather unreliable.

Anyone got a workaround or any clever ideas?

Thanks

Answer 1

I ran into this same issue. I'm embarrased to admit I stopped investigating when I found that Start-Sleep 5 seemed a reliable workaround.

Update-SPSecureStoreMasterKey -ServiceApplicationProxy $ssProxy -Passphrase xxx > $null
Start-Sleep 5
Update-SPSecureStoreApplicationServerKey -ServiceApplicationProxy $ssProxy -Passphrase xxx > $null
Start-Sleep 5

I guess theres a missing save/update/flush somewhere in those Cmdlets.

Not really a reasonable answer for a production quality solution but in my case I was trying to automate installation of our product for internal test purposes so a few sleeps were not a show-stopper.

Answer 2

"ChangeMasterSecretKey" from the instance of "Microsoft.Office.SecureStoreService.Server.SecureStoreServiceApplication" fixed the issue for me: SharePoint 2016 - Secure Store - MasterKey cannot be set! Problem Solved