Hotfix service is down

[zbalkan]

As of November 2018, Microsoft shut down the Hotfix service. That causes many of the SP 2013 updates crash and retry. I am not sure if it would be ok updating without them.

[brianlala]

Not sure what you mean. Do you have any references/links? I actually work for Microsoft and haven't heard about this.

[zbalkan]

Well, the problem occurred on downloading SharePoint 2013 April 2013 CU. When I try to go to the address on AppSourceBuilder.xml, I get the error DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN. It's obvious that it's not about the file or a part of url, but about the hotfixv4 CNAME. It doesn't exist anymore.

Then I took a look on the first page of Google Search and I see these articles 1, 2, 3. Microsoft Update Catalog does not have all the updates because of the ex hotfix service.

I had to delete every line that includes the hotfixv4 and go on with that for testing. That's just a workaround though. The issue is bigger than the script, so it might be a good way to use a workaround at all.

[gszdev]

This also affects the prerequisites based on the https://hotfixv4.trafficmanager.net url.

SP2013
KB2708075 447698_intl_x64_zip.exe
KB2472264 427087_intl_x64_zip.exe

Without having these files already in the target directory any fresh build of a SP2013 slipstreamed install media will fail. (As mentioned: download will fail)

[zbalkan]

Umm, I believe we need to test if the installation can be completed without the erroring hotfixes and updates. If not, we might need to find somewhere else distributing the missing ones.

[zbalkan]

Hi. Any news?

[gszdev]

You should give the current version a try (build a fresh slipstreamed media). The hotfixes located at https://hotfixv4.trafficmanager.net/... are commented out. Maybe the hotfix is no longer required or applicable for a fully patched Windows Server OS.