I've been racking my brain with this for a bit and figured I would ask here to see if anyone could enlighten me. As the title says, I'm trying to install the IIS role on Server 2003 using an unattended install method launched via a service. We're using RightScale and most of what we want to accomplish is pretty straightforward.

I created an unattend file for use with sysocmgr.exe:

[Components]
iis_common = ON
iis_www = ON
iis_www_vdir_scripts = ON
iis_inetmgr = ON
fp_extensions = ON
iis_ftp = ON

And I invoke it like so: sysocmgr.exe /i:%windir%\inf\sysoc.inf /u:C:\path\to\iis-unattend.txt /r /x /q

If I run that from a command prompt while logged in as Administrator it works just fine, but if it runs via RightScript (the RightScale user on the server, which is a local admin) it fails somewhere in the middle and the logs I get are rather unhelpful.

The thing is I can do this same thing with the SNMP Client (which is a Windows component, not a server role) and it works with no problems while run via the script service user.

My best guess is that sysocmgr.exe is expecting a GUI element to be there during the role installation and since the service user has no terminal session it coughs and dies. That's just a wild stab in the dark.