In my continuing battle with SharePoint, I needed to set up a new development environment. This time I am constrained to using Windows 7. Clearly, this has been done before and good instructions exist. But, as is frequently the case with me and SharePoint, it just doesn’t work as advertised. I was performing an install with a local account instead of a domain account (a constraint I have no control over), which I have had issues with before. This time I got a new error when trying to create the configuration database using the new-SPCofigurationDatabase cmdlet:
Keyset does not exist
Turns out this was happening whether I tried to do a complete install with the SharePoint version of SQL Express or with a full version of SQL Server. I found one post which purported to have the solution, but it wasn’t the case for me. I think Sasha was trying to do a standalone install, which is not what I wanted. I have SQL 2008 R2 installed, and I wanted to use that instead of getting another SQL Express instance installed.
This post pushed me in the right direction. Unfortunately, I did not have the directory pointed out in the post, possibly because I was on Windows 7. For me the path was:
C:\Users\All Users\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA
The service account I was using during the install did not have permission to that directory. So I gave it Read/Write access, and was able to create the configuration databases and using the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard to complete the setup and configuration of SharePoint.
