Adding Roles & Features Fail in GUI Mode Wizard

[thatley]

Hi,

 

I've searched in here for any details on this, but looks like no one has come up against this yet (or hasn't posted it). I'm hoping it might help anyone who gets the same symptoms and save time on the diagnosis.

 

Finished a live install of x2 2016 Servers this week ready to put in situ next week. It's been a pretty straightforward install with a few niggles with UAC/Profiles etc. but have overcome them. We're currently using Windows 7 clients.

 

The strangest issue I've been battling with is installing Roles & Feature from the GUI. When you click install for the Role/Feature, the install bar stops almost instantly and you get a red and white cross with no explanation as to why it failed! If you look at the Task Details, it just says 'Failed', no codes, nothing. I spent hours looking into this, suspecting UAC, Profiles, Permissions, post Promotion to a DC, but no change. Rather than using the built in Administrator (which MS always says not to use) we have always created another Admin user and made that a Domain Admin etc. which has always worked in the past (even in Server 2012 R2).

 

Installing works in these situations:

 

• If you're the built in Administrator
  
• If you use PowerShell to install each Role/Feature
  

 

Anyway, after a few days of pi$$ing around, I finally worked out is was one of my user policies which had home folder redirection on it that makes it fail!!! You cannot install any Role or Feature if this is attached to your Domain Admin user. I'm unsure if this is a bug / feature, or some other weird MS thing that's in place to not do things this way.

 

I'm sure many of you may not even do things this way with policies on your domain admin/administrator, but if you do - this article could save you some time.

 

Any comments welcome.

Edited January 12, 2017 by thatley

[FragglePete]

I've had this recently on fresh installs of Windows 2016 VMs that I've been building - usually when I go to add .net 3.5 - I'm not sure what the issue was (and usually just gave up and rebuilt again and all seemed well second time around). However, last time this happened I noticed something with regard not being able to see the server in the pool - can't quite remember the exact issue but it seemed to be hung up a bit as the IP address I set was for a server that had been removed / retired recently, but it seemed to resolve the IP address against the old server name and get hissy as it couldn't see that server name and therefore not connect to it. Double checked all my DNS entries and everything was in order, so not sure what the exact issue was.

 

Sorry, not much help I know

 

Pete

[a-mart]

I’m currently struggling through this same problem. I tried starting fresh but the problem remains. I can only install roles using the local administrator account but not my domain admin account. Tried re-enabling and using my domain administrator account but that fails role installs as well. I attempted the suggestion of blocking home folder redirection in group policy, but unfortunately that did not fix it for me.

 

Edit: Just to clarify this was a second domain controller being added to the network. Creating a new admin account on the new dc and using that solved the problem for me.

Edited February 22, 2017 by a-mart