Sitecore 10.3 failed installation

Have you been trying to install Sitecore 10.3 (or possibly another version) using the Sitecore Install Assistant (SIA) or Sitecore Install Framework (SIF)?

Are you pulling your hair due to an error message? Well then, let's hope that either of the below issues are of use to you!

Cryptic message regarding server certificates when running SIA on Windows 11

The certificate chain was issued by an authority that is not trusted

In Win11 (and Win Server 22?) it seems that SQL is a bit crankier regarding certificates and trusted connections. One option would be to adjust the powershell scripts (ending with -xp0.ps1) to pass in TrustServerCertificate=True where Invoke-SqlCmd is used.

Another (better) option would be to instead use the SIF approach. The scripts used here have different versions for sql commands and will pass the much needed argument automatically. It seems that at time of writing (2024-01-04) the scripts for SIA are not updated but for SIF they are. This issue may be present for older versions of SIF as well, so the recommendation would be to download the latest version.

Failed SQL login when installing the XConnect components

Cannot open database "foobar_Xdb.Collection.ShardMapManager" requested by the login. The login failed.
Login failed for user 'sa'.

TL;DR: Ensure that the sql user does not have a password containing a space.

Ensure that your sql user is indeed a database sysadmin and that username and password are correct

Likely that is not the issue as the XConnect user will be the user that you have either configured in SIF or entered in the SIA dialog, and the user has already successfully logged in and created a bunch of different databases.

Ensure that your sql user does not have a password containing a space

Yes... Apparently the powershell script that supplies the password does not handle that, and it will be passed in a way that is treated as multiple arguments. If you are using SIF then you will see an error that a part of the password is not a known argument. Using SIA you will see absolutely nothing.

SQL Server does not treat spaces in passwords in a "nice manner". Trailing spaces will be truncated and so forth, but here we're seeing another downside where a third-party does not correctly either escape or enclose the value with quotes. Protip: Use hyphens or underscores instead. Or just whichever silly character you like, e.g. 🦄! ...or maybe not as I don't trust that the encoding will be correct, stick to a-zA-Z0-9!&@$/\_- 😉.

Cheers and until next time!