Well I’m back again after another lengthy, baby-related hiatus. Hopefully things will calm down soon so the blog-writing will pick up!
Recently I had the opportunity to attend a Microsoft TechNet event (themed “Heroes Happen Here”…catchy!). Being in the Infrastructure IT Pro track, the focus of our presentation was on Windows Server 2008 and all the great new enhancements Microsoft has brought to the table with this release. Now, given some of the predicaments Microsoft’s buggy software has put me in in the past, I’m mainly a Linux guy. But this release looked good…REALLY good. The number of enhancements to Terminal Services (Goodbye Citrix), the settings you can push out by group policy, the logging capabilities, and the cherry on top Hyper-V make this look like a really strong release!
If you haven’t seen any of the new features Server 2008 brings, here are some of my favorites:
- Server 2008 Core-Now you can install the server with no GUI, no .NET, no IIS…Just a command prompt out of the box. From there you can use a very intuitive command line interface or the graphical remote management tools from your desktop to administer the server. The performance enhancements from chunking the GUI alone are HUGE!
- Remote Administration-Microsoft has followed Linux/BSD and put a protocol in place for a remote command shell from a server. This one has me a little nervous because it seems like something that could be compromised and used maliciously, but if Microsoft can get the security on it right it will be a big improvement.
- Terminal Services-Admittedly, Microsoft has stolen a lot from Citrix here. Terminal server now includes seamless application windows, so the user doesn’t have the effect of a Terminal Server (the application starts from an icon on their desktop and even though it runs on the terminal server appears to the user as though it’s running locally). Also, they’ve incorporated a web gateway for TS users to access their applications from.
So seeing all this (not to mention the fact they sent us home with a big binder of software including server 2008, SQL 2008 and Windows Vista Ultimate), I decided to drink the Kool-Aid and upgrade my home server to play around with some of the new features. I figured it would be a good test and fairly safe as I mainly use it to host my personal email on Exchange 2003 and share files with friends over FTP. As you might guess, this is where the shoe begins to drop…
The upgrade itself was fairly easy. I had to do the usual adprep /forestprep and adprep /domainprep to load the new schema extensions for Active Directory, and remove FrontPage Extensions from IIS. No big surprises there and the installer was actually quite helpful in telling me what was wrong and how to remediate the problem each step of the way. I fed it my product key and off it went. Truthfully I didn’t even watch the upgrade process, just let it run on its own and came back the next morning to find my nice shiny install of Server 2008 waiting for me to log in.
So I log in, get the desktop, and figure that everything is good to go. After all, I haven’t gotten any cryptic Microsoft error dialogs yet right? So I took a minute before work to check a few things. The Active Directory was there and in place, I could connect via FTP, everything seemed all right. I did notice the Exchange System Manager MMC wouldn’t load, but figured it was a common issue and something that would be easy to correct. I went off to work feeling good about the project.
I came home from work later that day to sit down and check my email. My Outlook client refused to connect to the Exchange server. Hmmm…I remote in to discover that all of the Exchange services were stopped. no big deal right? Exchange is finicky and those services trip up sometimes. I try to fire up the information store service and it bombs immediately failing to start. The other services were all the same. So I start poking around on the Internet and find people saying Exchange 2k3 won’t run on Server 2008. Not a big deal…I figured I have an MSDN account and a 64 bit processor in my server, I’ll just rebuild using Exchange 2007! Wrong again. Exchange 2007 won’t upgrade on Server 2008 either…A detail they conveniently forgot to mention in their presentation hyping how great this OS is.
So now my server is happily running FreeBSD, Postfix, and Spamassassin…And life is good again.
Posted by tcstool 
