The Sysadmins

So your have your Core Server installed, now what? This post will give you some options for configuring your install. We’ll cover basic commands, Sconfig and 3rd party tools.

Basic Commands

Show interfaces -> netsh interface ipv4 show interface

Set Static IP Adress -> netsh interface ipv4 set address "local area connection" static 10.0.0.10 255.0.0.0 10.0.0.1

Change DNS -> netsh interface ipv4 add dnsservers "local area connection" 10.0.0.2 index=1 (2 for secondary NS)

Enable Remote Desktop -> cscript C:\Windows\System32\Scregedit.wsf /ar 0

Rename Server -> netdom renamecomputer oldname! /newname:newname!

Restart Server -> shutdown -r

Join Server to domain -> netdom join /domain:domain /userd:abc /passwordd:123

Enable Window Remote management -> winrm quickconfig

SConfig

SConfig is built into 2008 R2 Server Core by default, and you can do a lot of the most common configuration tasks from here. It’s pretty straight forward and each step has on-screen instructions. Type sconfig from the command prompt.

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Server Core is Microsoft’s bare-bones version of Server 2008/R2, which was first introduced with Server 2008.

Microsoft did a lot of work reducing the attack surface with Server 2008 by cutting down on pre-installed features and roles. Server Core takes a step further, resulting in an even smaller attack surface. There are less patches, which means less reboots so overall maintenance time should be reduced. Server Core has a much smaller footprint too, requiring around 3GB for a running installation.

The traditional GUI that we’re used to seeing has been dropped and the ‘shell’ is nothing more than the command prompt. At first this might seem a little daunting for those used to the GUI but in part 2 I will talk you through common commands and some nice 3rd party GUI tools you can use to configure your installation.

In this video we’ll look at installing Server core 2K8R2 into ESXi. The procedure is practically identical on VMware player and workstation. The main difference being instead of uploading the Server 2008 R2 ISO to the Datastore you will store it locally.

Setting up a virtualized test machine/network is a great way of learning new technologies. ESXi and VMplayer are both free products from VMware which allow you to create guests, couple that with the free 180 trial of server 2008 R2 and you are good to go.

You can download the Microsoft Server 2008 R2 Trial ISO here.

Once you have the ISO, upload it to your ESXi datastore, personally I always create an ‘ISO’ folder for dumping them into. If you are using VMware workstation or VMplayer you can store the ISO locally.

In the following video I will perform a standard installation of Server 2008 R2 Core.

Server Core 2k8r2 #2 Configuring

This post should give you a quick understanding of WinRM, WinRS, forwarding event logs and when you’re likely to see the 0x80338126 error.

WinRM (Windows Remote Management) is Microsoft’s new remote management which allows remote management of Windows machines. It was introduced in Server 2003 R2, but I didn’t really hear much about it until Server 2008.

WinRM is the ‘server’ component and WinRS is the ‘client’ that can remotely manage the machine with WinRM configured.

Differences you should be aware of:

WinRM 1.1
Vista and Server 2008
Port 80 for HTTP and Port 443 for HTTPS

WinRM 2.0
Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2
Port 5985 for HTTP and Port 5986 for HTTPS

WinRM 1.1 can also be downloaded and installed on pre-R2 2003 and XP from here.

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