Using a local system account for installing SharePoint 2013 with SQL Server

When installing SharePoint 2013 in single server mode on a machine that is not connected to  a domain , you might want to use SQL server 2008 R2 or SQL server 2012 instead of SQL server express. But SharePoint 2013 configuration wizard wouldn’t allow you to do so and will throw an error stating local system accounts can be used only on standalone mode.

 

To work around this SharePoint validation and install SharePoint 2013 with a local system account and still use SQL Server, we will have to use the PowerShell command New-SPConfigurationDatabase to create a new SharePoint configuration database  and  rerun the configuration wizard. The New-SPConfigurationDatabase command will prompt for database name, server and farm credentials as user input. When prompted for the farm credentials you can supply the credentials of the local system account. The command will create a SharePint 2013 configuration database in the SQL server you have provided.

Once the SharePoint 2013 configuration database is created, you can re-run the SharePoint configuration wizard again and will notice the SharePoint 2013 farm is created and you will be able to proceed with the installation.

 

 

App Fabric cumulative update package installation error when installing prerequisites for SharePoint 2013

Recently I started installing SharePoint 2013 on a standalone machine without internet connection. The prerequisites installers were already downloaded and available. The prerequisites installation went smoothly till it reached the App Fabric installation stage. App Fabric installation caused an error and the cumulative update package was skipped.  When I manually installed App Fabric the cumulative package was not getting installed and was throwing a weird error “Package does not contain compatible update”.

 I thought as the server had Windows 2008 R2, I will have to install WindowsServerAppFabricSetup_x64_6.1 version of App Fabric. But this didn’t solve the issue either. After hours of installing, rebooting, reinstalling and searching the internet I came upon the forum post by Amalaraja Fernando  which clearly mentioned the steps to install SharePoint 2013 prerequisites on Windows 2008 R2 machine without internet connection. I followed the steps and ran the prerequisites installer manually with command line arguments and both the App Fabric and the cumulative update (KB 2671763) got installed successfully.