Installing Milestone Xprotect +

I have been a long time fan of the Milestone XProtect NVR software.  I have multiple installations, and have fought through many install and upgrade issues.

Before the Plus line of their software came out the XProtect product was pretty stable.  It just worked, albeit a bit limited in features.  The new Plus line fixes all the feature issues (lots of fun new features), but the install and upgrade process has become extremely fragile in the process.  Hopefully over time they will start to fix some of these issues.

In the meantime, I thought I would create an install list for anyone else struggling with it.  Almost all of my installs are on smaller windows 10 servers.  Considering that is not even a server OS, it was an afterthought by Milestone when they first started releasing the new product line, and might be the cause of some of these problems.

Install Steps:
- Uninstall IIS (Milestone will automatically install and configure IIS, if you already have it installed then sometimes the install will fail, especially if you have changed any of the default settings).
- Install SQL 2016 Express.  Milestone does not yet support later versions of SQL, and SQL 2015 that it ships with has a random bug in the GEO portion of its code that can cause the Milestone installation to fail.  While technically a SQL bug, Milestone could easily fix this by simply shipping sql 2016 with their product instead of 2015.
( I have been informed by Milestone that as of version 2018, SQL 2016 is the default shipped with it. )
- Do not at any point re-name the computer this is being installed on.  There is a Milestone/SQL bug where Milestone will get the old computer name from SQL and fail during install if you do this.  Again, a SQL bug, but one that Milestone could solve.  If you really want to rename it, then I have heard that there is a SQL script you can run so SQL sees the new computer name.  Research renaming a sql server computer name.
- Next start the Milestone installation, however, do a custom installation and only install the Recording server (assuming you are planning on an all-in-one box).  If you try and install all the software at once then it generally fails.  I believe this is due to a security bug in the Mobile Server install, but am not sure.
- Now do another Custom Milestone install this time installing everything.  Again, the custom install will prevent the Mobile server from being automatically installed.
- Open up the Management Client and create a new local admin account.  XProtect has some security bugs I have not yet figured out related to using the build in windows accounts which is the default.
- Use this local admin account when connecting to the Smart Client if the build-in account does not work.  Not a bad habit anyway in case you log into the computer with a different account in the future.
- Find and install the Milestone Mobile Server package.  When it asks for credentials to connect to the recording server, use the new local admin account you created instead of the default of the windows credentials.

At this point you should be up and running with a new install of Milestone XProtect+.  I have run into issues during upgrades where the database got corrupted in some fashion so everything looked good, but then I started having quirky issues when messing around with trying to bring cameras back online.