SharePoint 2013: Install Prerequisites Offline or Manually on Windows Server 2012 R2

What do I need to successfully install the Prerequisites?

  • A server with the 64-bit Windows Server 2012 R2 installed (Standard or Datacenter edition) upon which you intend to install SharePoint 2013 (in my case I installed it as a Hyper-V guest operating system)
  • SharePoint 2013 installation media
  • Windows Server 2012 R2 installation media

Why is attention to an Offline or Manual Prerequisites installation important?

Out of the box, the Prerequisiteinstaller.exe requires an Internet connection (i.e. the server is ‘Online’) to successfully complete the installation. If you attempt to use the out of the box PrerequisiteInstaller.exe on a Windows 2012 R2 server without an Internet connection, the installation will fail. 


Identifying all the Prerequisites for Windows Server 2012 R2

Here are the Prerequisite items applicable to Windows Server 2012 R2. I am breaking them down into three separate groups of Prerequisites for easy identification in relation to how the PrerequisiteInstaller.exe will identify and install the Prerequisites:
  1. Prerequisites that should be installed by default (among other things, the installer will check for and verify their presence)   
    1. Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5
    2. Windows Management Framework 3.0

  2. Next are the Roles/Features that are required for the “Application Server Role, Web Server (IIS Role)”. It turns out that this is a long list of Roles/Features - 46 in total. Further into this post, I’ll show you how to get this list while the Prerequisites are installing using the out of the box PrerequisiteInstaller.exe. Within an elevated (i.e. Run as Administrator) PowerShell prompt, you can use Get-WindowsFeature to see all of the Roles/Features installed on your server and map the Roles/Features in the table below to the labels used within the Add Roles/Features Windows Wizard.

    Net-Framework-Features
    Web-Server
    Web-WebServer
    Web-Common-Http
    Web-Static-Content
    Web-Default-Doc
    Web-Dir-Browsing
    Web-Http-Errors
    Web-App-Dev
    Web-Asp-Net
    Web-Net-Ext
    Web-ISAPI-Ext
    Web-ISAPI-Filter
    Web-Health
    Web-Http-Logging
    Web-Log-Libraries
    Web-Request-Monitor
    Web-Http-Tracing
    Web-Security
    Web-Basic-Auth
    Web-Windows-Auth
    Web-Filtering
    Web-Digest-Auth
    Web-Performance
    Web-Stat-Compression
    Web-Dyn-Compression
    Web-Mgmt-Tools
    Web-Mgmt-Console
    Web-Mgmt-Compat
    Web-Metabase
    Application-Server
    AS-Web-Support
    AS-TCP-Port-Sharing
    AS-WAS-Support
    AS-HTTP-Activation
    AS-TCP-Activation
    AS-Named-Pipes
    AS-Net-Framework
    WAS
    WAS-Process-Model
    WAS-NET-Environment
    WAS-Config-APIs
    Web-Lgcy-Scripting
    Windows-Identity-Foundation
    Server-Media-Foundation
    Xps-Viewer

  3. Prerequisites that must be downloaded and installed:
    1. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 Native Client
    2. Microsoft Sync Framework Runtime v1.0 SP1 (x64)
    3. Windows Server AppFabric
    4. Cumulative Update Package 1 for Microsoft AppFabric 1.1 for Windows Server (KB2671763)
    5. Windows Identity Foundation (KB974405)
    6. Microsoft Identity Extensions
    7. Microsoft Information Protection and Control Client
    8. Microsoft WCF Data Services 5.0

Prerequisite Installation issues you may encounter in an Offline environment

Issues with the PrerequisiteInstaller.exe when executed Offline


If you run the PrerequisiteInstaller.exe on an offline instance of Windows Server 2012 R2, you’ll experience the error message “The tool was unable to install Application Server Role, Web Server (IIS) Role”:
This tool requires an Internet connection to install Roles/Features and to download/install other Prerequisite files. Above is the first error screen you'll encounter if installing offline. Essentially if you are performing an offline installation using the PrerequisiteInstaller.exe, you won't be able to get any farther than this. 

Issues with using PowerShell to install Roles and Features when executed Offline

Examples you’ll find online will show you PowerShell similar to the following (ensure this is run at an elevated prompt, i.e. Run as Administrator) to manually install the Windows Server 2012 Roles/Features required by SharePoint 2013.
  • This will fail if the Windows Server 2012 R2 server is offline
  • This will not fail if the Windows Server 2012 R2 server is online ( you may need to enable windows update)
Import-Module ServerManager
  
Add-WindowsFeature Net-Framework-Features,Web-Server,Web-WebServer,Web-Common-Http,Web-Static-Content,Web-Default-Doc,Web-Dir-Browsing,Web-Http-Errors,Web-App-Dev,Web-Asp-Net,Web-Net-Ext,Web-ISAPI-Ext,Web-ISAPI-Filter,Web-Health,Web-Http-Logging,Web-Log-Libraries,Web-Request-Monitor,Web-Http-Tracing,Web-Security,Web-Basic-Auth,Web-Windows-Auth,Web-Filtering,Web-Digest-Auth,Web-Performance,Web-Stat-Compression,Web-Dyn-Compression,Web-Mgmt-Tools,Web-Mgmt-Console,Web-Mgmt-Compat,Web-Metabase,Application-Server,AS-Web-Support,AS-TCP-Port-Sharing,AS-WAS-Support, AS-HTTP-Activation,AS-TCP-Activation,AS-Named-Pipes,AS-Net-Framework,WAS,WAS-Process-Model,WAS-NET-Environment,WAS-Config-APIs,Web-Lgcy-Scripting,Windows-Identity-Foundation,Server-Media-Foundation,Xps-Viewer

The above code is the PowerShell that the PrerequisiteInstaller.exe will execute (in the PowerShell script file indicated in the above section) and it will fail if the server does not have an internet connection. We now know that the reason is Windows Update is required for the installation of the Net-Framework-Features will also install Net-Framework-Core which is .NET 3.5 and this required binaries and other files that are not included in a default Windows Server 2012 R2 installation.
When the above PowerShell is executed in an Offline environment or in case windows update is disabled, the required Roles/Features for Windows Server 2012 R2 are not installed which is the same experience when you execute PrerequisiteInstaller.exe. Here is the error message you can expect to see from PowerShell:


Now this is error message is more useful.
Add-WindowsFeature : The request to add or remove features on the specified server failed.
Installation of one or more roles, role services, or features failed.
The source files could not be downloaded.
Use the “source” option to specify the location of the files that are required to restore the feature. For more information on specifying a source location, see
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=243077  . Error : 0x800f0906
When you visit the provided link, it says that you need to in some way restore your Windows Server 2012 R2 installation. What!? But this is a fresh, clean and default install. Well it helps to know that the Net-Framework-Core feature is ‘Removed’ by default (you can confirm this at an elevated PowerShell prompt (i.e. Run as Administrator) by executingGet-WindowsFeature and looking at the status of Net-Framework-Core) and this is what the message is referencing – you need to restore this. For completeness, the Net-Framework-Features feature will automatically install the Net-Framework-Core feature. 
The clues to the solution are the following specific items from the error message:
  • "The source files could not be downloaded" – we know this because the server is offline.
  • "Use the 'source' option to specify the location of the files that are required to restore the feature"
  • Error code 0x800f0906.
Open up Internet Explorer and Bing the following: windows server 2012 Error : 0x800f0906.

The first result (when I searched) was titled “Error codes when you try to install the .NET Framework 3.5 in Windows 8 or in Windows Server 2012” and the support article can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2734782  . The specific resolution to solve our issue is in this support article. We need to re-run our PowerShell command but this time include the –source parameter specifying a specific the location within the Windows Server 2012 installation media. As an easy example, if your Windows Server 2012 installation media (ISO) is mounted to your D: drive, then the path to provide in the –Source parameter is: D:\sources\sxs. Now we know how to install the SharePoint 2013 Roles/Features Prerequisites successfully in an offline Windows Server 2012 environment.

Solutions - Offline and Manual Prerequisite Procedures


Installing the Roles and Features for SharePoint 2013 on Windows Server 2012 R2 Offline with PowerShell

To install the Roles/Features required by SharePoint 2013 on Windows Server 2012 R2 in an offline environment, you need to have access to the Windows Server 2012 R2 installation media.
For the purposes of example, assume you have mounted the Windows Server 2012 R2 installation media (ISO) to the D: drive of the server. Please note that you can also copy the files locally or specify a UNC path where the installation files are stored. You need to specify
Open an elevated PowerShell prompt (i.e. Run as Administrator) and execute the following:
Import-Module ServerManager
  
Add-WindowsFeature Net-Framework-Features,Web-Server,Web-WebServer,Web-Common-Http,Web-Static-Content,Web-Default-Doc,Web-Dir-Browsing,Web-Http-Errors,Web-App-Dev,Web-Asp-Net,Web-Net-Ext,Web-ISAPI-Ext,Web-ISAPI-Filter,Web-Health,Web-Http-Logging,Web-Log-Libraries,Web-Request-Monitor,Web-Http-Tracing,Web-Security,Web-Basic-Auth,Web-Windows-Auth,Web-Filtering,Web-Digest-Auth,Web-Performance,Web-Stat-Compression,Web-Dyn-Compression,Web-Mgmt-Tools,Web-Mgmt-Console,Web-Mgmt-Compat,Web-Metabase,Application-Server,AS-Web-Support,AS-TCP-Port-Sharing,AS-WAS-Support, AS-HTTP-Activation,AS-TCP-Activation,AS-Named-Pipes,AS-Net-Framework,WAS,WAS-Process-Model,WAS-NET-Environment,WAS-Config-APIs,Web-Lgcy-Scripting,Windows-Identity-Foundation,Server-Media-Foundation,Xps-Viewer –Source D:\sources\sxs

Your server will require a reboot after running this PowerShell code.

Downloading the SharePoint 2013 Prerequisite files for Offline Installation

SharePoint 2013 requires the following Prerequisites to be installed on Windows Server 2012 prior to installing SharePoint 2013. The following is a complete list of the Prerequisites along with their download links. Please note that .NET 4.5 and Windows Management Framework 3.0 are also prerequisites and have been intentionally omitted from this list as they are both installed by default on Windows Server 2012 R2.
Obviously you need to download these from the Internet. This is the only portion of this deep dive that can’t be done offline. You’ll need to copy/save these into a location accessible to the SharePoint 2013 Prerequisite installer. See the next section for more details regarding their installation.

Installing the Downloaded Prerequisite files for SharePoint 2013 on Windows Server 2012 R2 using PrerequisiteInstaller.exe

For a TechNet reference to the PrerequisiteInstaller.exe and its switches, see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff686793.aspx  .
For the purposes of example, let’s assume the following:
  • You have the SharePoint 2013 installation media copied locally within Windows Server 2012 R2 at c:\sharepoint2013bits.
  • You have copied the downloaded Prerequisite files to the c:\sharepoint2013bits\PrerequisiteInstallerFiles folder. (See the previous section regarding which files to download)
  • As a note – if you have multiple SharePoint 2013 servers to build, you will be better off placing the SharePoint 2013 installation files on a network share. In addition, you should also copy the downloaded prerequisite files to the location specified above within SharePoint 2013 installation media prerequisiteinstallerfiles directory on said network share. This will make your life easier. Although this example uses local paths, UNC paths on a network share are fully supported as long as the logged in user installing the prerequisites has read rights to the UNC network path location.
Based on the scenario outlined above you can execute the following PowerShell code (at an elevated prompt, i.e. Run as Administrator) to install the prerequisites.

Make sure the second line is all on one line. 
$SharePoint2013Path = "c:\sharepoint2013bits"
  
Start-Process "$SharePoint2013Path\PrerequisiteInstaller.exe" –ArgumentList "/SQLNCli:$SharePoint2013Path\PrerequisiteInstallerFiles\sqlncli.msi /IDFX:$SharePoint2013Path\PrerequisiteInstallerFiles\Windows6.1-KB974405-x64.msu /IDFX11:$SharePoint2013Path\PrerequisiteInstallerFiles\MicrosoftIdentityExtensions-64.msi /Sync:$SharePoint2013Path\PrerequisiteInstallerFiles\Synchronization.msi /AppFabric:$SharePoint2013Path\PrerequisiteInstallerFiles\WindowsServerAppFabricSetup_x64.exe /KB2671763:$SharePoint2013Path\PrerequisiteInstallerFiles\AppFabric1.1-RTM-KB2671763-x64-ENU.exe /MSIPCClient:$SharePoint2013Path\PrerequisiteInstallerFiles\setup_msipc_x64.msi /WCFDataServices:$SharePoint2013Path\PrerequisiteInstallerFiles\WcfDataServices.exe"
When you execute this the Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Products Preparation Tool will appear. Follow the prompts and your Prerequisites will install.

 Important Note: (I wrote this article specially for this)
 If you installed the above list by double click every installation file you will get this error  message when you start SharePoint installation setup:
 "Windows Server AppFabric is not correctly configured. You Should uninstall Windows server AppFabric     and reinstall it using the SharePoint Products Preparation tool"
72
you can resolve this problem by uninstall Windows server AppFabric and run the following command in PowerShell from setup file location:

.\WindowsServerAppFabricSetup_x64.exe /i CacheClient”,”CachingService”,”CacheAdmin /gac

Wait until AppFabric installation finish then double click on AppFabric1.1-RTM-KB2671763-x64-ENU.exe to install the AppFabric patch. Reboot the server and run SharePoint Installation again, the error message should disappear .

6 Facebook Hack Codes & Tips To Show Off Your Geeky Skills


The very first thing I should mention is that when it comes to Facebook, there’s really no such thing as “hack codes.”  The title of this article is  partially tongue-in-cheek, because with Facebook, the rules change so often that one “Facebook hack” code that works today will likely not work tomorrow.  Facebook designers change links and features at whim  and you’re left trying to guess  why your link or plug-in no longer works.

#1 – The Konami Code Lens Flare Hack

This is a rather silly hack, but if you’re visiting friends who may not be very computer savvy – this is a very easy way to impress them with your hacking skills. Borrow their computer (or bring your laptop), log into your Facebook account, and then on the computer keyboard just type the following key sequence of arrows and letters exactly: UP-UP-DOWN-DOWN-LEFT-RIGHT-LEFT-RIGHT-B-A-<Enter>
Then, click around on your Facebook page, or scroll up and down the page (this seems to work best), and you’ll discover a pretty cool display of lens flare effects.
facebook hack codes
Oddly, the effect isn’t horribly annoying because it disappears pretty quickly when you really need it to. It isn’t the most impressive hack though, because it’s probably the most common one mentioned across the net – but it’s still kind of cool and fun to play around with.

#2 – Aye, Make Yer Profile a Pirate’s Page You Landlubber!

The second profile hack is also one of the easiest to implement. Facebook offers users the ability to transform their Facebook pages into any language that they like. If you scroll down to the lower left corner of your profile page, you’ll see your current language setting. Click on this, and you’ll have a list of all languages available to you. Notice the English Pirate option?
facebook hack codes
Ahoy matey – yer now a Cap’n! Now as you go through your profile page you’ll notice some pretty hilarious pirate variations.
facebook hack and codes
Now, the wall is the Plank, your profile is the Cap’n's Log, and you can now either click a post as pleasin’ to me eye (like) or blabber t’yer mates (comment).  It certainly removes the “boring” factor from your old standard Facebook pages.

#3 – Upside Down Status Updates

If you’ve been on Facebook long enough, you’ve probably noticed a few people posting upside down status updates. They sure do think they’re clever don’t they?!  Yes, you too can be the envy of all of your friends and family by posting your updates so that people have to look silly by tilting their heads upside down so they can read it.
Most of the people you’ve seen doing this have likely installed a Facebook app just to do so. However, I dislike installing apps because you always have to provide permissions to those applications to access your profile. A better approach is to use the free online application at FlipText to generate your upside down status update.
facebook status fun
Simply copy the upside down text from the lower text box, paste it into your Facebook status box and post!

#4 – Download Complete Photo Collections From Your Friends’ Profiles

If you have a lot of friends on Facebook, you may not have the time to keep up with all of the new family photos they’ve posted – but you are very interested in them and would love to have them stored in your own private photo collection to review later. Well, thanks to a very cool FireFox plug-in called FacePAD, you can do just that. The add-on is awesome, and I would recommend that anyone with the resources to do so should send in a contribution toArthur Sabintsev for his efforts.
After you install the FacePad plug-in, make sure you select Tools->Add-Ons, and configure the options for FacePad so it has your correct Facebook language. Then, all you have to do is go to your friend’s photo albums, right-click on the title and select “Download Album With FacePAD.”  That’s right, you’re not downloading a single picture – but an entire album.
facebook status fun
Once you do, FacePad downloads every single image within that album into the download folder you’ve configured in FireFox. Don’t forget to organize all of those photos usingJetPhoto, as recommended earlier by Jeffry.

#5 – Schedule Facebook Status Updates With Sendible

Do you like to keep your Facebook profile active, but you’re coming down with a cold and may be offline for a few days?  Maybe you’re taking a trip and won’t be anywhere near a computer for a week. Or maybe you’ll be playing hooky from work and traveling, but you want your colleagues and boss to think you’re stuck at home sick. Accomplish any of these wishes by using Sendible to schedule your Facebook status updates. This is an application Daniel covered earlier, so check out his article for more details.
But for Facebook specifically, once you sign up with Sendible, just click on Facebook and provide your Facebook login details. Sendible connects directly with your Facebook account. The, under “New Messages” click on “Status Updates“.
facebook status fun
On the next page you can schedule out as many updates as you’d like! This service is awesome – and you can distribute scheduled updates to a number of social networks including MySpace, Blogger, Twitter and more.

#6 – Hide Your Online Status From Certain People

Look, don’t feel bad about it. When I first joined Facebook I left my online status wide open. After a couple of weeks of getting inundated with nonstop chat requests, I simply turned off my online status completely. Problem solved. Except, there really were certain people I wouldn’t mind hearing from – is it really fair for a few chatterbox buddies to ruin your chances for communicating with everyone? Well, there is a way for you to selectively block your online status from certain people.
facebook profile customise
All you have to do is open up your chat icon in the lower right corner of your Facebook display, click on Friend Lists, and create a new list called “BlockList.” Make sure after you create it that it’s configured under “Display these lists in Chat.”
facebook profile customise
Now, all you have to do is either click “edit” and add the friends you want to block, or if they’re already online, just click their name and drag them under this new list. Once you’ve got everyone there who you want to block from see your online status, hover your mouse over the green dot to the right and click on “Go Offline.” Now, you appear offline to only thosecertain friends.
Facebook, unlike MySpace, is not really easy to tweak – which is actually a good thing. Gone are the days of those horrid eye-bleeding pages with pink flashing backgrounds and instant music that you can’t turn off. However, the tweaks and plug-ins in the list above offer at least a few ways to customize your Facebook account and usage to suit your life and your personality.

Schedule Emails in Gmail and De-Clutter Your Inbox With Boomerang

One feature which I miss in Gmail is the ability to schedule emails so that they go out at a certain time. Scheduling emails is similar to scheduling tweets in Twitter but scheduling emails have a lot more advantages. One of them is that you get an opportunity to review and correct mistakes in your messages before they go out (which do happen at times).

Gmail does not allow you to schedule emails as of now, and they might not do that in near future. However, Gmail does offer users with an option to undo send a message for up to 20 seconds. Nevertheless, it would always be nice to have a feature which would allow you to schedule your email messages too.

In comes Boomerang, a Google Chrome and Firefox add-on which allows you to schedule email messages to go out after a certain period. As you can see from the screenshot above, Boomerang allows you to schedule messages to go out after a set time and even allows you to schedule an exact time for the message to go out.

Once you schedule the message, Boomerang will store the email headers on their servers and send it out at the specified time. Pretty neat solution for an online email service.




Adding and Customizing Feedjit to Provide Live Traffic Feed for Your Website

Feedjit provides a live feed free tracking tool to track your Blogger Blogspot blog or any website visitors in real time. Feedjit gives you up to the minute information about where they are from, the type of browser used, the landing page your visitors arrive at and where they exit from. It also displays the search keyword or keywords the visitor used to access your blog and will help you understand more about the content your visitors are interested in.

A free Feedjit Live Traffic widget can be a very useful widget to add to a Blogger Blogspot blog because it provides details about the kind of content your visitors are interested in. It is simple to customize and add a Feedjit widget to your Blogger sidebar or footer. Included is a tutorial that will walk you through every step of how to place a Feedjit Live Traffic Feed on a Blogger blog.

It is easy to place a Feedjit Live Traffic Feed widget into the sidebar or footer of your Blogger Blogspot blog or WordPress. It only takes a few minutes to customize the look of the widget to suit your blog and paste the Feedjit javascript code into a gadget in your Blogger sidebar or footer. Below is a step by step tutorial that will make it a breeze to get a Feedjit Live Traffic Feed widget for your Blogger blog.
  1. Go to design tab of your blogger blog and click "Add a Gadget"
  2. Choose HTML/JavaScript widget
  3. Copy and Paste the following code to the content area as shown in the figure.

    <!-- Begin  alaawiki.blogspot.com - provided code -->
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://feedjit.com/serve/?bc=FFFFFF&tc=D52A33&brd1=FFFFFF&lnk=5F5F5F&hc=000000&ww=310"></script><noscript></noscript>

MySQL - String concat multiple rows using group_concat

If you are implementing a tagging system like what you see with WordPress, then you may have a requirement to fetch all the tags of each article in the blog when displaying the blog. As each article has many tags, one option is to first fetch all the articles and for each article fetch the list of tags. However, there is a better way to do this in one single SQL when using MySQL.
MySQL has the function group_concat that allows one to condense a set of rows into one single row by concatenating the list of values.
The SQL will be something like

Nokia N8 cpu underclocked at 192 MHz not 680 MHz!!!

Many mobile phone reviews that listed the specification of the Nokia n8 mobile phone mentioned that the Nokia n8 CPU was clocked to 680 Mhz of pure processing power.Well there is a new handy application that is called X-plore and shows your devices serial number,total memory,free memory and cpu speed.I installed the app and then launched it and I found some interesting info for my device.I saw that the CPU clock speed was set to 192 MHz and Nokia did say it was clocked to 680 MHz. Is that right?


How to Write-Protect USB Flash Drive


Many a time, it becomes necessary for us to write protect our USB flash drive so as to protect it from viruses and other malware programs. Because flash drives are so popular and most widely used to move data between computers, they are the prime target for attackers as a means to get infections spread around the computer world. Also, since USB drive is not a Read-Only Memory (ROM), the data inside it can easily be modified or deleted by malware programs.

How to Hack Symbian S60 Phones to Install Unsigned Applications and Get Rid of Certificate Errors


If you own a Nokia Symbian S60 phone, you will most likely be aware of the fact that it is not possible to install applications on it unless they are signed using a valid certificate. Have you been trying to install applications on your S60 3rd or 5th edition phone but ending up getting a certificate error? At times, this can be really annoying; but here is a smart solution to this problem!
Here in this post, I will show you how to hack your Symbian S60 3rd or 5th edition smartphone, so as to modify the phone’s firmware and completely bypass the mandatory signing requirement. So, once you are done with this one time hack, you should be able to install any compatible application including unsigned and those with an expired certificate.

Avoid WORMS In USB Devices


USB Devices like i-pod,pen drives e.t.c; brings viruses/worms which are bad since it disables a lot of features as well as it ruins memory the slows down the whole thing. It disables much of the removal process like Windows RegEdit.exe, MsConfig.exe and also TaskMan.exe. Variations of these also disables your keyboard during normal booting, floods your disk with virus files in the root directory and also the windows directory and some also floods your directory with Folder looking icons that is an executable..
So here are some tips in avoiding this:

Exiting Windows the Cool and Quick Way


Normally it takes a hell lot of time just Shutting down Windows, you have to move your mouse to the Start Button, click on it, move it again over Shut Down, click, then move it over the necessary option and click, then move the cursor over the OK button and once again (you guessed it) click.This whole process can be shortened by creating shortcuts on the Desktop which will shut down Windows at the click of a button. Start by creating a new shortcut( right click and select New> Shortcut). Then in the command line box, type (without the quotes.)