New Server
The Windows 2003 server at the office has been struggling to keep up with the demands placed upon it. It was a great machine when we bought it: dual PIII 1 GHZ processors with 1.5 GB ram and mirrored 120GB hard drives. Today it’s severely strained in the way it’s used. It’s a Terminal Services machine with four to five consecutive users at any given point in time who each have a half dozen intensive programs open. If I dismiss the minimal use from the receptionist workstation that’s still around 300MB ram for each user.
First I talked to our software vendor to determine if our tax software was going to run on Windows Server 2008 x64. I was assured that the QA and development departments were working on Server 2008 and x64 and that both are likely to be listed as approved/supported Operating Systems by mid-summer. After that we called up Dell to give them our list of requirements. We ended up with a Power Edge T300. On Dell’s website these are starting at $1278.00 with no OS and one 250GB hard drive. Ours cost nearly $5k with raided hard drives, dual 1Ghz NICs and licensing.
Saturday was the first that I was able to get into the office to start configuring it for our use. The first boot of Server 2008 requires the Administrator password to be set. After several failed attempts to enter a password at the prompt I realized that hitting the Enter key on this screen is the same as clicking on “Cancel”. Sombich! I had to actually use the mouse to click on the the little button to the right of the confirmation box to get the machine to accept the changed password. Why did it default to Cancel when hitting enter? That’s not the expected behavior. When I enter the password at the login screen Enter is the key that I want, it defaults to “Enter” why not when changing the password? Of course this is a minor hitch and not a deal breaker – it’s merely frustrating for 10 minutes or so to figure out what Windows is doing.
Once logged in the Initial Server configuration screen pops up and runs through several options. Downloading updates, setting firewall options, setting up roles for the the server all of this is done from this screen. It’s nice and convenient except for the reboots required. I needed to change the network settings. It was configured through DHCP to start but I wanted a fixed address and changed the NIC to the address that I wanted. It took the changes with no problems – and no reboot required. I then changed the Workgroup and the computer refused to let me change anything else until I rebooted it. I could not add roles until it rebooted.
Download updates – reboot.
8 more updates – reboot.
IE8 – reboot. (To be fair, I had canceled an IE8 upgrade earlier. This reboot might have been combined with another if I hadn’t done that)
Set server roles: TServer, print services, file sharing – reboot.
Now, to the things that bothered me. IE8 is crippled to the point of worthlessness. The default security settings are to let nothing run. The popup security warning tells me that there are things that won’t run on the web site that I’m looking at. There is a check box to not warn me next time, a button to add whichever site that I’m looking at to the Trusted Zone and an OK button. There is no “Allow this site this time only” button. Try downloading Firefox from Mozilla.org when the installation file is on an ever changing mirror. It’s not gonna happen. I don’t really want to add ftp.goomba.nl to my Trusted Zones. And if I trust mozilla.com or mozilla.org and try to add that to my Trusted Zone it refuses to save it unless I uncheck the box forcing only secure connections. There is no option to allow some http sites and some https sites. Nope, it’s force all https or allow anything. What if I trust the regular connection to mozilla.org but not the regular connection to microsoft.com? I can’t force the secure connection to microsoft.com without breaking mozilla.org or vice versa. What if I trusted all of microsoft.com but only the secure connection from mozilla.org? I know, unlikely, but really. After fighting with it for some time, I downloaded the latest Firefox on another computer and copied it across the network.
I am going to have to get IE8 to a usable state because of ActiveX – the reason Microsoft had to set draconion security measures in the first place. It’s required on a handful of sites that are mission critical. Of course, if IE8 is completely broken on nearly everything else I just might force the remaining die hard IE fans onto Firefox.
I then tried to get my Terminal Services licensing installed. Dell sends out the information to log in to the Open Licensing web site to get our licensing. The page is down for maintenance and will be until Monday morning 7:00am. This is one problem with software licensing and activation – something Plays for Sure owners already know too well. I can’t do anything more with this server until at least Monday.
I then went to add users. Of course a security restriction (regarding passwords) meant that I couldn’t just add them. I had to poke around and finally found where to set the password policies after reading several pages on the internet. It’s not next to the users and groups section where it might make sense of course, it’s in a completely different menu.
Next, I checked out the defrag options. I clicked the defrag button and a sparse menu popped up. Defrag was recommended and I ran it. Unlike previous versions there is no graphical indicator showing the defrag status, no elapsed or remaining time, just a window that showed which drive was being defragged and a message stating defrag could take a few minutes or hours. Since there wasn’t much on the drives yet defrag didn’t take long, but I’m disappointed that the graphical screen seems to be gone.
