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Heroes Happen Here (in Macclesfield)

The current Mrs D. recently abandoned me for the weekend to go off on an away day at York University, bored and on childcare duty I decided 7pm Friday night was the time to upgrade my home office server to Windows Server 2008. What a night that turned to be...

...I’ve been playing with Windows Server 2008 since it was Longhorn – but this was my first time installing outside of the safety net of Microsoft Virtual PC. I’d taken the advice of Alistair Holmes and Paul Thomas, two of our Windows Server 2008 experts, and was feeling pretty confident – It was as it turned out destined to be a long night.

7:05pm: Step 1 – decide which of the many versions of Windows Server 2008 was right for me. I work from home and currently use Windows Server 2003 for web access via ISA Server 2006 and file and print services .  Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition seemed to be a worthy successor (The Enterprise edition adds clustering, more virtual image rights and support for more processors). There are actually four versions of Windows Server 2008 Standard:  

• Windows Server Standard Edition with Hyper-V – 32bit
• Windows Server Standard Edition without Hyper-V – 32bit
• Windows Server Standard Edition with Hyper-V – 64bit 
• Windows Server Standard Edition without Hyper-V – 64bit 

Hyper-V is the new microkernelized  Hypervisor virtualisation platform from Microsoft (ie virtual server capabilities). As my intended server hardware (until an hour before it was my daughters PC) doesn’t support the required virtualisation CPU extensions but was a 64bit AMD CPU, I plumped for the 64bit version of Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition without Hyper-V.

Installation was easy. If anything it was quicker than doing it in a Virtual PC session.  Borrowing from Vista, it’s now an image based install – it installed in around 30 minutes. With another 30 minutes to configure Active Directory and DNS. My new server, now named moonpig.moonbase.alpha was now live.  Incidentally, Windows has a new install mode called Server Core. Server Core installs without a GUI (in my day, a non-GUI file server was called NetWare).  There are specific roles that can exploit core mode, including Active Directory and Hyper-V servers.

7:49pm: Moonpig is a 2 year old PC with an NVIDIA chipset. Windows Server 2008 didn’t have 64bit drivers for the video or IDE interface. Nor did it support one out of the three installed network cards. I thought I’d try the 64bit Vista drivers – they worked a treat. Decent access speeds through the IDE drivers, 1024x768 video. I made a note to buy a couple of 500gb SATA disks and a new PC for my daughter.

Now it was time to tweak it to death. Server Manager, a sort of holistic MMC, is a great tool. Making it very easy to add and mange roles (DNS, DHCP, Active Directory) and features (Firewall with Advanced Security). I’ve liked this tool since it first appeared. A few clicks and DNS, DHCP and the firewall were added. The firewall is a greatly improved component with multiple inbound and outbound rules. I’m replacing an ISA 2006 box (Yes I really do have an ISA Server in the garage).  I tweaked the rules to deactivate some defaults I didn’t need.  LDAP in for example. (I understand ISA will not run on 2008 at all).

There is a new AD controller type, the RODC or Read-Only-Domain-Controller, or as we used to call them, a BDC. Ideal for branch office deployments but irrelevant for me at Duffield Towers.

If you want to have a look at this, the aforementioned Paul Thomas has written a one-day Windows Server 2008 workshop, you can find out more Windows Server 2008 Technical Workshop here.

9:00pm: The server is in, fully configured and ready to go. I change the MAC address on the outbound card to match the old ISA box and plug it into my Virgin Media 20mb pipe. (Do you remember when 10mb was enough to wire up an entire business?) – Checking the properties revealed that I was indeed running Windows Server 2008 – Service Pack 1. SP1 already? Apparently its down to sharing code with Vista. The first Service Pack for WS08 will be called SP2. Gartner may have to rethink their “wait till SP1 before you deploy” advice.

9:10pm: Time to add a computer to the domain and open a beer…Failed !  The PC could resolve the domain but not join it. It seemed DNS related to me and an hour of NSLOOKUP’s and DNS manager followed. Nothing solved the problem. I tried an XP virtual image – same problem.

10:18pm:  I remove AD and DNS and try again, no improvement. Back to Google and NSLOOKUP. The wife phones to see if I’m surviving without her – she reminds me she works in finance and can’t really help with DNS issues.

1:46am: I’m close to putting the old server back when I decide to try the domain join with the firewall switched off. I’m in. I’ve attached.

2:00am: I re-enable the LDAP firewall settings I turned off earlier in the install. Another PC joins just fine. I’m up and running. I’m up and going to bed.

Saturday 9:23am:  I check the thetrainline.com to see what time Mrs D. is due back. I can’t access it. Seemingly I can’t get to certain web sites from some PCs, including some Microsoft sites. Back to NSLOOKUP. DNS however was working a treat. I could PING it, TRACERT to it; I just couldn’t view it in IE (or Firefox).

10:55am: Somewhere at the back of my mind I remembered reading something about SMB and packet fragmentation causing a similar hit and miss approach with some web sites. I enabled a larger packet size via the JUMBOPACKET property of the local LAN card. The problem goes away. The server is alive and well and still working the next morning.  One thing is clear to me; I need to update some of my training and certification. There is now a Technology Specialist certification around networking, maybe that would be a good place to start, or the Active Directory Technology Specialist would be better, after all networking is working now…if you are an MCSA 2003 you can prepare for a single exam and get both. An MCSE can prepare for a single exam and get three Technology Specialist certifications. If you would like more details, I’ve worked hard with my colleagues to pull together a PDF that outlines the options for Windows Server 2008 learning and certification. Let me know what you think.  

See also the Microsoft Heroes Happen here site.

4:00pm: Mrs D. arrives home and is straight on to her laptop to check her eMail and to give iPlayer some stick. It all works without a hitch…zero user down time. Now that is a win. Although I’m in trouble for not mowing the lawn or feeding my daughter.