After I'd installed WSS 3.0 on one VM, I naturally wanted to install MOSS 2007 on another.

After the trials and tribulations of doing the OS part of this correctly, (see recent blogs) I had a VM setup that had all the pre-requisites for a Basic MOSS installation.

I have a personal MSDN subscription so all I do is to download the latest version from the MSDN site and install. Right?

Yes, BUT.

The first day the link to the subscriber downloads refused to work.

The second day, that link worked but when I tried to download MOSS 2007 + SP1 I got a mysterious message "The response from the web site is missing required information" and the download went to "Interrupted" state in the Download Manager.

Later that day I finally managed to start the download. The next morning it was all downloaded except for the last 3.2MB and obviously didn't intend on downloading them.

So I grabbed the only MSDN DVD I could find with MOSS 2007 on it. This was only the initial version not the one with SP1. In addition I couldn't make the VM realise that I had a DVD player with that file in it. So i was forced to use the DVD Player of the Host and copy enough directories across to the VM.

Once I'd done that I started the installation and naturally - as I ought to have remembered, as I've said it often enough in the newgroups/forums - it refused to install as the OS I was using was Windows Server 2008 and that requires you to have the 'MOSS 2007 + SP1' distribution.

Naturally I'm too lazy to create that from the distribution I have plus SP1, so I went back to the PC and decided to unload from the MSDN site again, only this time to the Host from where I'd copy it to the VM.

Naturally this gave me a series of  "The response from the web site is missing required information" messages and nothing happened.

What's left is

a) seeing if i really don't have a copy of 'MOSS 2007 + SP1' somewhere in my set of DVDs. (If I don't have one in English, maybe I have one in some other language).

b) waiting for the MSDN upgrade that an e-mail yesterday told me is on its way. maybe that will have the right DVD.

c) Trying at home on Vista (or even OSx) to do the download. Maybe then I won't get that message and the download will download 100% of the file and not 99.9%.

d) Giving up and installing Virtual Server 2005 and the vhd of MOSS that will only run on Virtual Server 2005 and will only work for 30 days.

e) Giving up and downloading the (public) evaluation version of MOSS. With luck that will be valid for a couple of months and maybe, just maybe, my MSDN license code will work on it too.


Plenty of more fun and frustration ahead !