FIX: A network error occurred during SQL Server Native Client installation

One of the things that I have been pestering the SQL team to do is to name their updates according to what is contained in them. For example, instead of just:

sqlncli.msi 

What I’d prefer is that the file was called something like:

SQLServerNativeClient2k8SP1CU3x64.msi

So I normally rename them as soon as I receive them, to avoid confusion in future. However, today I found that doing so caused me a problem. After renaming the file, and installing it, the installation failed with the error:

“A network error occurred while reading from the file: C:\temp\sqlncli.msi”

A quick inspection of the error shows that the code in the msi is looking for the file by name. Renaming the file back to the original name makes it install ok. It’s a pity that the person coding the installer didn’t pick up the name of the file programmatically, rather than hard-coding it.

Anyway, hope that helps someone that sees this error.

2011-11-26