Problem

The VA Admin service is not starting after an upgrade to VA 4.12.2.

Resolution

When a key/certificate for the “SSL Communication For Admin Server” is configured before the upgrade, you must call the tool apachepassphrase to write the encrypted server password to the registry. In VA server 4.12.2 the Apache HTTP server reads the password from the registry instead of opening a password dialog. This was done because Windows 2016 no longer supports services using an interactive dialog.

The tool apachepassphrase.exe is in the Apache\bin directory of the VA server installation directory.

This command sets the password:

apachepassphrase -set " <VA Server password>"

Afterwards the VA Admin service can be started.

This command reads the current value of the password and writes it to "stdout".

apachepassphrase