Debugging Steps in SharePoint 2013 UPS Creation

This may not help anyone but me, but I’m going to post this for myself nevertheless, as it seems to happen enough to me that it’s about time I document this, so here goes.

1. Ensure you have the service “User Profile Service” running in the “Services on Server” on the intended server running UPS.
2. Ensure BEFORE you start the “User Profile Synchronization Service”, go into the servers Services and set “Forefront Identity Manager Service” and “Forefront Identity Manager Synchronization Service” startup type to “Disabled” and Log On as “Local System Account” (these will get setup to the proper values later on – just trust me).
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3. Ensure BEFORE you start the “User Profile Synchronization Service”, that the “AppFabric Caching Service” is started and running as the farm account (you can change the account it’s running as later).
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4. If starting the AppFabric service fails, look at fixing the AppFabric service.
5. If you fixed it in step #4, Ensure the AppFabric service is running in services.
6. Now start the “User Profile Synchronization Service”.
7. Note: If this machine is hosting Central Admin, you’ll need to restart IIS.
8. If that service fails to start, clear the configuration cache.
9. Now ensure the AppFabric service is still running (refresh the window a couple times just to be sure).
10. Now try starting the “User Profile Synchronization Service”.

This sequence seemed to work for me (this time around at least).  I’m sure I’ll add to this in the future as more fun rears it’s ugly head.