SCCM: Installation on hardened server

One of my Customers asked me to migrate an existing SCCM 2012 R2 to SCCM CB. They preferred side-by-side migration.

Everything looked good until I figure out the server they gave me for the new SCCM was hardened. I guess security team did it for good but as a result I had some fun with a trivial SCCM installation.

1. They used a third-party tool to remove TLS 1.0-1.1 and old SSL leavin only TLS 1.2 available. 3DES was killed too.

As a result, when I ran prereqchk.exe /Local before SCCM installation I received errors about SQL indexing, collation page (which I knew I set correctly), sysadmin membership etc… SQL looked good, but in

prereqchk log I saw: “Failed to connect to the SQL Server, connection type: SMS Master”

and in even log I observed: A fatal error occurred while creating a TLS client credential. The internal error state is 10013.

I removed fresh Machine keys from Programdata\microsoft\crypto\RSA – did not help

I set “Use FIPS compliant algorithms for encryption”  after that the error in event log changed saying TLS 1.0 protocol is using (never new it is FIPS compliant), but it is not configured.

So, at this point I ran IISCrypto and learnt the protocols are disabled.

As soon as I enabled the old obsolete TLS 1.0 prereqchk.exe passed smoothly and I started SCCM installation

Microsoft says  only SSL3.0 should be disabled and clearly requires both TLS 1.1 and 1.2 enabled. But in my case I still needed TLS 1.0 enabled too. So it looks like a working progress for me.

There is another article from Microsoft. It talks about TLS 1.2 configuration for SCCM CB 1610+. But it looks like it is about post-installation TLS 1.2 support and had an issue during installation. In addition, I tried my best to understand what should I configure on Windows Server 2016 with .Net 4.7 and SQL 2016 SP1 and as far as I understood I should do nothing, it supposed just work . I would prefer Microsoft present the information in some kind of matrix for different .Net versions, OS versions and SQL…

2. Everything was fine until installer tried to setup a Management Point.

This time an error in ConfigMgrsetup.log said:

Unable to find an existing certificate in the store.  Creating a new self-signed certificate…    Configuration Manager Setup    11/20/2017 11:48:55 AM    3228 (0x0C9C)
Failed to release a handle to a cryptographic key (0x80070057)    Configuration Manager Setup    11/20/2017 11:48:55 AM    3228 (0x0C9C)
Failed to release a handle to a CSP or key container (0x80070057)    Configuration Manager Setup    11/20/2017 11:48:55 AM    3228 (0x0C9C)
Failed to create the certificate (0x8009000f)    Configuration Manager Setup    11/20/2017 11:48:55 AM    3228 (0x0C9C)
ERROR: Failed to find or create SQL Server certificate.    Configuration Manager Setup    11/20/2017 11:48:55 AM    3228 (0x0C9C)

this time I spent more time troubleshooting and finally opened a case with Microsoft. The tech found local Administrators was kicked out from permissions for Programdata\microsoft\crypto\RSA  and Setup could not create a private key there. We granted Full Control to local Administrators group, re-install MP and tis time it was setup.

3. Setup, bot not properly running – both standard tests (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb932118.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396) from web browser gave me Internal Server Error (HTTP Error 500.19)

Fortunately I found Heinrich’s article (http://heinrichandsccm.blogspot.ca/2013/05/http-error-50019-internal-server-error.html). I re-installed WSUS  and MP started to work. After that I ran wsusutil for postinstall configuration and it finished successfully.

And after all changes above I succeeded to install SCM 4.0 before it failed with generic 1603 error.