I was working on trying install SSI (Server Side Includes) on an Windows 2012 IIS8 box, set up by someone else. Doing everything the usual way, I was using PowerShell (as I do for all server admining this days, just so much faster) like so:
import-module ServerManager Add-WindowsFeature web-includes
Only to get the wonderful response shown above in the screenshot. Not very informative really. So I double checked the syntax, but that looked fine. Tried going through GUI to do it, same error just took longer to pop up. Spun up a Windows 2012 VM I had kicking around on my laptop and ran the same snippet, success. So what could it be. Googling showed some MS notes that didn’t offer much information that seemed relevant to this particular case, and in once case seemed to suggest a complete rebuild as the error was due to a corrupted system/iis config issue.
Not fancying a rebuild I thought I’d delve deeper into the IIS configuration to see if there was anything that could be manually fixed. Doing this I discovered that the box had once been part of a shared config setup across a number of boxes, and was now the only one left. BUT, it was still set up with a shared config folder. That was quickly removed and the config exported locally. Reran the Add-WindowsFeature, and this time everything added itself properly.
So it looks quite likely that the error is a catch all (for IIS at least) when the process can’t read or get a lock on the IIS config for one reason or another. So if it crops up checking through the config files for anything funny is probably a very good first step.
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