SharePoint base 2013 set up error

Last night, I made the decision to try out SharePoint Base 2013 on a clean Windows Hosting server 2012. I made the decision to set up SharePoint Base in a separate method. This is the set up procedure I followed:

First begin the SharePoint Base set up expert. There you choose”Install application prerequisites”. During this procedure, be sure that you have a web based access, because it will obtain all dependencies during the set up procedure of the requirements. Your device will restart twice (in my case), so just to let you know that your device must be able to execute a restart.

Next step is to click on “Install SharePoint Foundation“. In my case, I didn’t reboot yet, so I got this warning:

But once I’ve rebooted, everything went fine. First step in the installation is to select the installation mode. In my case, this was Stand-alone:

After completing the installation, the “SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard” starts. Because it’s a stand-alone mode, it will not ask my any questions, and it will start configuring my SharePoint instance.

On thing that I noticed was the fact that Step 2 took really long, but my system was not really doing anything special. Until I got this error after a while:

Failed to connect to the configuration database.
An exception of type System.Management.Automation.CmdletInvocationException was thrown. Additional exception information: ErrorCode<NonDomainNWService>:SubStatus<ES0001>:Service running under Network Service account in workgroup environment is not supported.

Looks like when you perform a stand-alone installation, and your service is running with the Network Service Account on a machine not connected to Active Directory, the configuration database could not be created. Bummer!

The solution to this can be found on this technet link. It’s quite simple (once you know it). Open your commandline prompt and navigate to “C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\15\BIN”

There you execute the command:

psconfig.exe -cmd Configdb create SkipRegisterAsDistributedCacheHost

This will now create your configuration database, and skipping the error that the GUI gave us. So, one step further, the configuration database has been created. What you can do now is re-run the configuration wizard to continue the rest of the configuration steps. But now, you will see another error:

As Neil Sly described in his post on technet:

This was an issue when installing SP2010 Beta, specifically when trying to create search service where this same error crept up, then the solution was essentially to script the installation of search.

Despite psconfig failing I decided to try Central Admin – which loaded without issue.   Checking service apps I can see “error” next to Search – so again, the issue crops up in this beta.

And indeed, if you open the SharePoint Central Administration window, you see your brand new SharePoint Foundation 2013 instance.

When you look at the “Service Applications“, you will indeed see that there is an error in the Search SA: