SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

Strictly speaking this quick article doesn’t really have anything to with SharePoint, but hopefully it might help-out someone out there in SharePoint land.

One of the projects I’m currently working on is a 2010 Farm build, we are just getting the media set ready to install SharePoint with AutoSPInstaller, and of course need to download the Pre-Requisite Installer Files. For this particular project I have no local access to the servers so everything is being done by RDP on the server. So to download the Pre-Requisite Installer Files I’m was using this script from codeplex, but it was failing with a really wierd error

I tried it on a few different servers, but they all had the same problem.

I could of course simply open the script, grab the URL’s and paste them into a browser, but where is the fun in that.

This KB article talks about foreground / background transfers, and this being a problem when using background transfers and that foreground should be okay.

This article describes the cmdlet references for BITS and the –Priority switch that controls the foreground / background transfer setting

So the fix was to change this line

Start-BitsTransfer -Source $Url -Destination $DestFolder\$DestFileName -DisplayName "Downloading `’$DestFileName`’ to $DestFolder" -Priority High -Description "From $Url…" -ErrorVariable err

to this line

Start-BitsTransfer -Source $Url -Destination $DestFolder\$DestFileName -DisplayName "Downloading `’$DestFileName`’ to $DestFolder" -Priority Foreground -Description "From $Url…" -ErrorVariable err

and Voilá, pre-reqs downloaded .