CRM 4.0 Installer Troubles

Written by:

When installing CRM 4.0 you may get a error in the last bit of the installer that says:

Action Microsoft.Crm.Setup.Server.ProvisionBusinessAction failed.
A referral was returned from the server.

After lots of googling for answers and not finding any I decided to run WireShark and actually look at the communication going on between the installer and our domain controller.  What I noticed was that right as the installer failed it sent an LDAP query to the domain controller asking for everything within dc=DomainDnsZones.  Due to some glitch in our active directory the domain controller was responding with a referral to itself which was causing the installer to fail.

After some research on what domainDnsZones was I went into the active directory and removed it using ndtsutil.  After waiting a few hours for the changes to propagate through the domain domainDnsZones reappeared, but now when queried the DC responded with actual data instead of a referral.  I ran the installer again and lo and behold it worked!

Posted on May 15th, 2009 in Technology, Tips & Tricks.