Homeserver Forum

Just noticed this morning April 15 that Lights out on my laptop was unable to connect to the server. Investigation showed that the Lights out service was no longer installed on my Server 2016 essentials server.
I had the download for version 3.7.0 and installed it. This made everything come online as expected. I then downloaded the 3.7.1 update and installed it, the result was there wasno longer a Lights out Service running on the server or showing in the services list so the clients can't connect. I then tried to restart the server thinkin that perhaps the install would continue on restart. This resulted in the server not shutting down or restarting properly, it just hung saying preparing the server for over an hour and I had to power it off to attempt a restart. Unfortunately the server no longer starts up, it just sits with the Windows startup circle spinning.
Now I have no server running. It never gets to the point where I can log on.

After crashing the server twice and using safe mode I managed to get the server online so I could completely uninstall Lights out. It is now rebuilding the drive array. Hopefully I can then reinstall 3.7.0 and somehow stop the upgrade from automatically installing.

Was the manual update to 3.7.1 successful? Or have you seen errors during install?

I like to get the logs if possible.

Regards
Martin

The manual update resulted in the same situation...no Lights out service installed. The update says it completed OK but looking in the services there is no entry for Ligths out anymore. I went back to version 3.7.0 and it is all working.

Windows Server 2016 is nasty, if it is attempting to install updates, this may take a long time indeed in the stage of "preparing" at shutdown and at boot (often enough I am sitting 30 minutes and more while doing remote patch sessions on customer systems in the evening, waiting for that reboot). Microsoft never bothered to fix it.
Best greetings
Olaf