This week I was building a SharePoint 2013 farm for a client. We were using the AutoSPInstaller (Awesome tool!). However, we got ourselves caught in an infinite loop.

Essential, the installer would start, try to install the prerequisites, throw the errors:

WARNING: 2013-08-07 18:19:01 – Error when enabling ASP.NET v4.0.30319

WARNING: 2013-08-07 18:19:01 – Error: The tool was unable to install Application Server Role, Web Server (IIS) Role.

WARNING: 2013-08-07 18:19:01 – Last return code (1)

 

And then restart the server. This loop would just continue. Digging further into it, the client was using WSUS to deploy updates to servers, and these were the first 2012 Servers that had been added to their environment. Microsoft released a KB2734608 with a WSUS patch that addresses this issue – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2734608. Unfortunately, we looked into deploying the patch so we could continue the install but were unable to get it deployed into the production environment quickly. So, I can’t verify that the patch will fix the issues. However, we did find another fix.

 

If you open the Windows Registry you are trying to deploy SharePoint on, navigate to the key HKLM/Software/Policies/Microsoft/Windows/WindowsUpdate/AU and set the UseWUServer to 0 and reboot the server. This will prevent the server from looking to WSUS for updates and the prerequisite installer will successfully complete and you can finish your installation.

 

Once you have SharePoint installed, you can set this key back to 1 (although your updates from WSUS still won’t work until you get the KB patch referenced above installed).