Fresh all in one node installation of SP2023R2 with a new galaxy - failing to create a winplatform instance.

Hi Jakob, No, sounds like a pretty normal procedure and should work.
Are you able to create a derived template from your $WinPlatform template?

The first WinPlatform instance created will always be pre-defined as your GRNode platform (no need to enter network address) and will be labled with a black icon for ease of identification (yellow in prev. versions).

Subsequent platform instances will use the white server icon and will have a error until a Network address is defined.

But since it sounds like you are unable to create any instance it would be interesting to get some more information regarding this.

As stated in the beginning, can you create a template from $WinPlatform? and then an instance from this template?

Can you create an instance from any other template, such as $Area or $Engine?

Could you please provide the exact error message and any information written to the Log at the time of the failure?

Hi Richard, I checked and I can create instances from other templates, area, appengines, userdefined. I can not create any new from the winplatform template, neither instance or der. template.

there is already a platform as you describe.

From the derivation view (screenshot) 

the black platform has already some instances assigned to it

deployment view below

I am not able to activate any warnings errors or info in the log, which log flags should I turn on?

Hi Jakob, I'm still at a loss here, don't have a clear answer for you on what could be the reason for the error.
There are of course several more things to try in the task of sorting out what could be the reason.

My first thought is that there is something corrupt in your galaxy, would it be possible to try and create a new galaxy and this time, select the Blank Galaxy as template?

This will create a new galaxy from the default (empty) template.
And it will not contain any other object templates than the standard base templates, and no Instances at all.

What happens if you create instances from $WinPlatform in this galaxy?

Would it be possible to get a screenshot of the error that pops up, even if nothing is written to SMC?

Hi Richard, thank you for looking into this,

here is a screenshot, created an new galaxy like you suggested.

1

2

I did not get any msg in the log.

I tried again here is a screenshot of the log, 2:19 should be the time to look at.   

One far fetched theory,  could the host computer name play a role?, as the name win-r2d2, has the symbol

 - 

When you successfully create a platform template or instance normally no entries are logged to SMC.

Using "-" symbol in the computer name should not be an issue, (at least not related to this) this is actually part the standard name if you do not rename your server after install.

"WIN-<random>" and my test environment is named WIN-AG79ELDT7QD and has no issues.

Did you rename your server before or after your install if System Platform?

Is your server part of a domain or stand alone workgroup?

If you want you could send me your galaxy, it would be interesting to sort out if the issue is related to your environment or a corruption in the galaxy?

You could send it through https://wetransfer.com/ (my details in my bio)

If this is not reproduceable on a secondary node, and your setup is a dev machine I would believe it might be faster to reinstall your server and software.

Another option is to contact techsupport, perhaps they have seen this issue before.

Hi Richard, thank you for all your help.  

I got a suggestion from support which i am going to try out. It might have to do with the SP23R2 installation file i used. Will be re-installing everything and keep you posted how it goes.  I dont think it makes sense to send the galaxy, it is basically just a completely new and empty galaxy. Which I have created multiple times and always resulting in the same issue.

Hi finally solved! thank you  David Gardner  

the issue was this, see screenshot below

right click on the installation file, choose unblock. then perform the installation.

That's great!

Yes, that is one of the undocumented things that seems to be important, until now I have not seen a live example of things actually going wrong if this is not done in quite a while.

When I asked Techsupport on what problems to expect if this is not taken care of I only got the response 'Weird sh*t is going to happen' and I guess this really qualifies as that!

For you who reads this post, to clarify, when downloading files from the internet, Windows label them as "Locked" and you can Unlock it as Jakob describes above, the thing to know is that this 'Locking' also follows to VMWare hosts and mounted files using the downloaded ISO file will also experience un-documented issues.

This is not an AVEVA issue only, even iso files from Microsoft are locked upon download, but the effects seems to be different from product-to-product

But perhaps AVEVA should stress the importance of this action on the download page if there are known issues that leads to corrupt installations.

I'm very thankful that you shared your experience Jakob, since this is a thing that is very hard to troubleshoot and figure out.