Windows Tip Sheet
Read Before You Leap
A problematic SCDPM 2006 installation provides a little real-life lesson on the benefits of reading.
Microsoft’s System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) 2006 seems
like a cool piece of software (albeit it has an unwieldy name), so I decided
to install it here in the Tip Sheet Global Testing Labs to see what it could
do. Partway through the installation, I started to get the idea that things
weren’t going well: The progress bar was stuck in some kind of infinite
loop, and it was obvious that nothing was happening on the hard drives. The
status message implied that it was trying to install IIS 6, which was already
installed. After about 20 minutes of this, I got an error message saying that
IIS installation had failed.
Hmm. Since this was a test machine that had had other stuff running on it,
I figured it would be easier to start from scratch, so I reapplied my base image
and tried installing SCDPM 2006 (nope, the name is no better as an acronym)
again. Same thing.
Okay, I checked the install log, a file called Dpmsetup.log (DPM -- that’s
a nice, short name). There wasn’t anything exactly useful in the log (is
there ever?), but I did notice messages like “Microsoft.EnterpriseStorage.Dls.Setup.Exceptions.BackEndErrorException:
Error in the application.” That looked curiously like a .NET Framework
error. Now, I know DPM uses a Web interface, so maybe it needs ASP.NET? That’s
not installed in IIS 6.0 by default, and I hadn’t installed it. A search
of the Microsoft Knowledge Base turned up article
908182, which confirmed my suspicions: You get exactly the symptoms
I’d been seeing if ASP.NET isn’t installed prior to installing DPM.
So I followed the, er, directions in the installation Readme to install ASP.NET
and to enable network COM+ access -- and DPM installed just fine.
The KB article cleared up one thing, though: DPM itself doesn’t have
a dependency on ASP.NET: DPM uses SQL Server Reporting Services, which does
need ASP.NET.
Read more about the problem in the official Knowledge
Base article.
About the Author
Don Jones is a multiple-year recipient of Microsoft’s MVP Award, and is Curriculum Director for IT Pro Content for video training company Pluralsight. Don is also a co-founder and President of PowerShell.org, a community dedicated to Microsoft’s Windows PowerShell technology. Don has more than two decades of experience in the IT industry, and specializes in the Microsoft business technology platform. He’s the author of more than 50 technology books, an accomplished IT journalist, and a sought-after speaker and instructor at conferences worldwide. Reach Don on Twitter at @concentratedDon, or on Facebook at Facebook.com/ConcentratedDon.