Windows Server Team

I just wanted to say "thank you" to everyone who came along to one of our sessions at today's Community Day at the Microsoft Campus in Reading. I hope you enjoyed it - and please leave feedback on the UK User Groups website (the feedback form should be live next week).

For anyone who missed my sessions - either because you were in another one, or couldn't make it along - or even if you did make it along and you need some more information (I skipped over some content in both the sessions that I had meant to cover), then you can find the slidedecks and videos on my SkyDrive.

In the chalk and talk, we discussed a number of potential subjects for future user group meetings. The list we came up with was as follows (in no particular order):

• Windows 2003 and 2008 co-existence
• PKI
• Real-world Hyper-V deployment
• iSCSI - Windows Storage Server? Build your own SAN that's affordable?
• WS08 - clustering - especially stretched
• IIS 7 - from an infrastructure perspective
• What's changed 2003-2008 (DHCP, IAS, etc.)
• Real-world experience of migrations
• Microsoft Application Virtualization (was SoftGrid)

I look forward to seeing you at an event sometime soon.

Last night, I rebuilt my Windows Server 2008 machine at home to use the RTM build (it was running on an escrow build from a few days before it was finally released) and Hyper-V RC0. The recreation of the virtual machine configuration (but using the existing virtual hard disk) meant that Windows detected new network adapters when I started up the VM. Where I previously had a NIC called Local Area Connection using Microsoft VMBus Network Adapter I now had a NIC called Local Area Connection 2 using Microsoft VMBus Network Adapter #2. When I went to apply the correct TCP/IP settings, a warning was displayed that the IP address was already assigned to another adapter. In a physical environment, I could have reinserted the original NIC and uninstalled the drivers, but that was less straightforward with virtual hardware.

I tried getting Device Manager to show the original adapter using set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 start devmgmt.msc but it was still not visible. As described in Microsoft knowledge base article 269155, I ran devcon to identify the phantom device and then remove it. After identifying the identifier for the NIC, I used:

devcon -r remove "@VMBUS\{20AC6313-BD23-41C6-AE17-D1CA99DA4923}\5&37A0B134&0&{20AC6313-BD23-41C6-AE17-D1CA99DA4923}"

Note: the devcon package from KB311272 includes versions for i386 and IA64 but not x64. For 64-bit, devcon is one of the Support Tools on the Windows installation media (suptools.msi).

Earlier today I needed to administer a Windows Server remotely using a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in. The computer I was using was in one domain and the remote server was in a workgroup, meaning many MMC operations failed. I tried running MMC as the administrator using runas /user:remotecomputername\username mmc but kept getting: "RUNAS ERROR: Unable to run - mmc 1311: There are currently no logon servers available to service the logon request."

Then I found out about the /netonly switch for the runas command, used to indicate that the supplied credentials are for remote access only. By changing my command to runas /netonly /user:remotecomputername\username mmc, I was able to authenticate against the remote computer without needing the credentials to also be valid on the local computer, as described by Craig Andera.

A few months back, I wrote a post with a few commands to get started with server core on Windows Server 2008. Since then, I've had some fun tweaking server core installations (including some cheekiness installing third party web servers and browsers). Sander Berkouwer wrote a series of blog posts last summer that look at changing the look and feel of a server core installation:

1. Changing regional and language options as well as time and date options
2. Changing display settings such as screen resolution and color depth
3. Changing keyboard and mouse settings/cursors
4. Changing the splash screen, logon screen and tweaking the command prompt window

Server core may be intended for core infrastructure servers in lights-out data centres but some customisation can be useful.

The whole point of the server core installation mode for Windows Server 2008 is a reduced attack surface - no Windows Explorer, no Internet Explorer, no .NET Framework. That's all well and good but sometimes it's useful to download a file over HTTP to a server core machine. No problem - just download a version of GNU wget that has been compiled for Windows and use that to download the file. It needed a couple of configuration items to get past my corporate proxy server:

set http_proxy=http://proxyserver:portnumber

then

wget --proxy-user=domainname\username --proxy-passwd=password http://uri/

I also installed Mozilla Firefox (v2.0.0.13), Apple Safari (v3.1) and Opera (v9.26) on server core. Safari installed but has a dependency on the Internet Options control panel applet which is not present in server core. Opera had no noticeable issues. Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 installation failed as expected, redirecting to Microsoft knowledge base article 949220. For a text-mode browser, I found a version of Lynx compiled for Windows but it needed NTLM auth support via NTLMAPS which depends on Python.