Exception occurred when trying to issue security tokenactivated

Question

I have just completed an upgrade of one of our servers from Windows 2008 to Window 2012 running Sharepoint 2010.

Our sharepoint site works but we have run into an issue with the Search facility. I have used the ULS view to track down the error to this:

An exception occurred when trying to issue security token: The requested service, http://localhost:32843/SecurityTokenServiceApplication/securitytoken.svc/actas could not be activated. See the server's diagnostic trace logs for more information.

Can anyone offer any assistance please?

Answer 1

For Search to work the securitytoken.svc should work . To troubleshoot this issues, it will be good to check if we can browse to the STS Web Service page.

To browse you have to go to IIS Manager --> Sites --> SharePoint WebServices --> SecurityTokenServiceApplication, click on 'Content View' down at the bottom, right click on Securitytoken.svc and click Browse. This service should work for search to work .

How to fix STS : https://web.archive.org/web/20150206061252/http://blogs.technet.com/b/sykhad-msft/archive/2012/02/25/sharepoint-2010-nailing-the-error-quot-the-security-token-service-is-unavailable-quot.aspx

Fix 1 Check if we can browse to the STS Web Service page. To browse you have to go to IIS Manager --> Sites --> SharePoint WebServices --> SecurityTokenServiceApplication, click on 'Content View' down at the bottom, right click on Securitytoken.svc and click Browse (as shown below)

Fix 2 Right click on the SecurityTokenServiceApplication and click Explore, copy the web.config and compare the file with an out-of-the-box file with no modifications. Try replacing the file with a fresh copy and resetting IIS (keep your original file, of course).

Fix 3 Run the following commands one by one on SharePoint PowerShell:

$h = Get-SPServiceHostconfig
$h.Provision()
$services = Get-SPServiceApplication
foreach ($service in $services) { $service.provision();
write-host $service.name}

Answer 2

Thanks for the assistance. The powershell stuff in the post fixed our issue. We had tried the first bit, replacing the web.config, with no success. The powershell commands have resolved everything and we are now able to search again.

Thanks

John