We recently found the following error when attempting to apply a new custom web server Chef cookbook that was meant to standardize the Windows Server features/roles across an existing set of servers.
Installation of [Web Server (IIS)] Tracing failed.
Attempt to install Tracing failed with error code 0x80070643. Fatal error during installation
There were actually several features that failed to install with this same error. The cookbook had been applied successfully to several other server before hitting this error on a later server. So this indicates there had been configuration drift on this server.
We found several blog posts with various suggestions and tried many of them but no change.
One suggested removing the Windows Activation Service (WAS) feature and the ApplicationServer/WebServer roles. We noticed an error after the role removal indicating that the AppFabric COM component had caused a problem along the way. So we removed AppFabric as well.
This appeared to be the underlying issue as the next chef-client run completed succesfully.
We removed AppFabric using the “/r” flag with the setup file.
WindowsServerAppFabricSetup_x64.exe /r
If this solution solved your problem or you have further questions, please leave a comment below.
Happy Troubleshooting!