I came across an interesting issue today where I couldn’t get applications to install on a specific piece of hardware during a task sequence. All task sequence steps would run fine, other than ‘Application’ installs – and they would work fine on other hardware.

Looking in the smsts.log file, I could see the following error for each application:
Execution status received: 24 (Application download failed)

I checked the boundaries, everything was good. Google has many instances of the same issue, but none seemed to have relevant (or helpful) solutions. In the end, I realised this device has 4G LTE with a valid SIM in it, and it was connecting automatically during the task sequence. It seems this was confusing it and it couldn’t locate the content for applications!

The simplest solution I could find was to disable the NIC during the task sequence, then re-enable it at the end. The following are the powershell commands I put in the task sequence to get it working:

To Disable: powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command “Get-NetAdapter | ?{$_.MediaType -eq ‘Wireless WAN’} | Disable-NetAdapter -Confirm:$False

To Enable: powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command “Get-NetAdapter | ?{$_.MediaType -eq ‘Wireless WAN’} | Enable-NetAdapter -Confirm:$False