This error may be old news to a lot of you, but I’m finally getting back into playing with the goodness known as Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager, aka ConfigMgr, aka SCCM, and went through quite a bit to get it set up in my lab.

I jumped right in and did it blindly, which, although worked fine, I did have some speed bumps along the way.

I used several PowerShell one-liners I slapped together to install all the Windows’ features & WADK; however, when I got to the SQL portion of the SCCM installer (where you point to the SQL FQDN, Insance Name, Database name, etc), I kept getting a very generic error that simply said

The network path was not found.

and the log file, ConfigMgrSetupWizard.log, said

At face value, this sounds like a simple network connectivity issue. However, I could nslookup the FQDN of the SQL server, which happened to be the same box (all-in-one install), I could ping the FQDN, netstat showed port 1433 was listening, my firewall was turned off, so I started googling.

Everyone points at these as the problem:

  • Firewall
  • SPN
  • SQL Port
  • Maybe a few others I’m forgetting?

As it turned out, I forgot to enable and start the Remote Registry service. That’s all it was. I actually had this in my notes:

But forgot to run them, lol!

Oh well, live & learn! I think I’m going to do another post regarding the different one-liners I ran to get SCCM 2012 R2 up and running.