Robert Allen: Blog Post: Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor tool failed to run with error message ?Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor was unable to reach the Microsoft server for compatibility information. Check your internet connection and try again later.?

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

This is an interesting problem we want to share with you.
When you run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor tool on a system that must use a proxy in order to access the internet you receive the error:

“Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor was unable to reach the Microsoft server for compatibility information. Check your internet connection and try again later.”

In the error log (%temp%\WuaDiagnostics.log) you can see the update advisor tries to access:
http://aeos.microsoft.com/compatibilityexchange/compatibilityexchange.svc and then receives the error like following:
[7/23/2010 12:04:41 PM] Exception: The request failed with HTTP status 407: Proxy Authentication Required

As we confirmed, the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor does not support proxy authentication.

We should make some changes on the proxy, creating an anonymous access rule specific to the destinations FQDN's used by the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor, for example, you may create the following rules:

Action: Allow
Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS
From/Listener: Internal
To: Domain Name Set
aeos.microsoft.com
aestats.microsoft.com
crl.microsoft.com
download.microsoft.com
go.microsoft.com

Reference:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprohardware/thread/d229910f-2360-470d-b0f9-9e67e17ae67e
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprogeneral/thread/f964885e-8ae2-4ea9-b7c3-5411acd12ccd
http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-IN/w7install/thread/a1c57313-0297-4dc4-8b51-80eb865a7150

Robert Allen