Workflow manager backend service certificate

Question

I'm quite new to the .NET Workflow stuff. I've made a workflow service and now I want to host this service using IIS. (This workflow was well tested by debugging it in VS2012)

I'm using AppFabric and Workflow Manager to configure all of this. Workflow Manager made all the databases needed to persist the workflow instances and the Workflow Management Site in the IIS. Then I've published my workflow service into a zip file and imported this into my Workflow Management Site.

Everything was fine and running when I had shut down my computer two days ago. Now my Workflow Manager Backend service won't start anymore. When I watch the eventlogger this is the critical error:

The Workflow Manager backend failed to start at location 'WorkflowServiceBackendHost.Start' due to an exception: System.InvalidOperationException: Certificate '90ED72666C964EE0902E84767A0D284D66F6B725' is not found in the certificate store.

I found the sha1 of this certificate in 'Microsoft.Workflow.ServiceHost.exe.config' file in 'C:\Program Files\Workflow Manager\1.0\Workflow\Artifacts'. But it's not possible to change it and try something else. So I guess it was a generated certificate by the Workflow Manager configuration. I searched in my certmgr.msc for this sha1 and could not find it. But I didn't change or remove any certificate and I don't think that the certificate could be expired because I installed and configured everything two days ago. I don't think this is the same certificate that is used for the communication between the service and an external application.

Maybe I could change something in the Workflow Manager configuration but this tool doesn't start. Probably because the service isn't started. But as I said I'm new to all of this and the information I found this far didn't help me or was re installing the workflow manager etc. But then I wonder what will happen if all of this is in production.

Could anyone help me to get this Workflow Manager backend service up and running again?

Thanks in advance, Tim

Answer 1

Reset the Auto-Generation Key for WFM and Service Bus

i. $CertKey=convertto-securestring ‘YourPassword’ -asplaintext -force;
    1. Note: Update with YourPassword with your own password
ii. Run this step: 
    1. Set-WFCertificateAutoGenerationKey –Key $CertKey
iii. Followed by this step: 
    1. Set-SBCertificateAutogenerationKey –Key $CertKey 
iv. Update the Hosts: 
    1. Stop-SBFarm
    2. Update-SBHost  
    3. Stop-WFHost
    4. Update-WFHost  -certificateautogenerationkey $CertKey 
    5. start-sbfarm

Check that the Get-WFFarm and Get-SBFarm output has changed certificate thumbprints