Installing .NET Framework 4.5 Features Hangs on Starting Installation Server 2012

Question

I am running Windows Server 2012 Standard and have installed IIS 8.0 but need to install the Application Development role service, however when I try to do so the installation progress never moves. It stays on 'Starting installation' and the progress bar never changes. I have checked the event logs and there are no errors in there. Anyone know why this might be happening?

Solution

Well, this one took me a while. It was weird because I've had a lot of Server 2012 installs that never developed this problem, but a server I was setting up did.

In this case, the server had two public IPv4 addresses. One IP address was meant to be used by IIS, and one was meant to be used by a legacy server that runs as a Windows service. By default, IIS will bind to all available IP addresses, so I had issued a command to make it stop it:

netsh http add iplisten fee.fi.fo.fum

where fee.fi.fo.fum was the public IP address.

This caused the Server Manager GUI to hang forever at "Starting installation" when using "Add Roles or Features". Strangely, installing features via the Install-WindowsFeature cmdlet in PowerShell worked fine. But I felt uneasy that something was broken.

I stumbled across this blog post which hit the nail on the head. To confirm that I had created in an issue with the Windows Remote Management service (which was indeed running), I ran

winrm quickconfig

which vomited with an error about the client being unable to connect.

I followed the recommend solution of adding the loopback address to the iplisten list:

netsh add iplisten 127.0.0.1

restarted the server, and poof! Server Manager started working again. Hope this helps someone.

Comments

[5lovak]

There is more to this now. It appears that I can't add or remove any roles at all, so it looks like this could be a permissions based issue.

[5lovak]

This is not permissions based by the looks of it. I'm on my 3rd 2012 server (thank goodness for testing environment) and the same thing is happening when trying to add application development features