Monday, August 11, 2003
Server Blues
I setup a new sever recently, or I should say I am in the process of setting it up. It will be running Windows 2003 Server and will eventually be used to host my web site. There in lies a tale as good as anything Jerry Pournelle would have written in his Chaos Manor column in the old Byte magazine.
I had some old sticks of RAM laying around and thought I would make use of them in the new server. So, I drove down to a local parts shop and showed him what I had. He only had one motherboard that would support the older RAM, so I took it, a 1.6 Gig Athlon processor, and a case. I could piece together everything else from the carcasses of several older PCs that are stacked up in the corner. Since this new processor is faster than the one I normally use, I figured that I would pull the drives, video controller, etc out of the current desktop and put them in the new case.
Everything went fine with the construction process. I plugged in the cables and turned on the power. That's when things got ugly. Windows reported that one of its required files was missing or corrupt. That's when I started to panic. No backup. But, I thought, the Windows XP setup program should be able to fix this. I located my Windows DVD, put it in the drive and ran setup, selecting the Repair option. I wonder if the option should be Maybe Repair, because it didn't fix anything. That meant I had to reinstall Windows. I was now an entire evening into the process and hadn't even gotten to the new server yet.
Well, the Windows install went better than anything else so far. There were no glitches. The only problem was, Windows was technically a new installation. That means I had to reinstall all my applications. That process took until 2:00 AM and most of the next day, but most everything was back in place. Luckily I hadn't lost any data.
Now, on to the server. I scavenged the parts and put them in the case. I had previously made a setup CD using the the images from my MSDN Universal DVD, but it wouldn't boot, even though it was supposed to be bootable. I got out my Win98 boot disk and booted from that, then started the setup process from the CD. Everything seemed to work. The keyword being "seemed". The server refused to boot from the harddrive.
So, back to the floppy. I reformatted the drive, then started the setup again. Again, everything started out ok, but during the step where setup copies files, it refused to read from the CD. Retry and Ignore did nothing, so back to the DVDs to burn a new CD. Thankfully, this one worked and the server was soon running.
You may know that Windows 2003 Server installs with pretty much everything turned off. I had to install IIS, Application Services, and the Theme service. This last service is what allows the UI to look like Windows XP. And that's where I am now...a week after starting the entire process. I'll actually plug the server into my network in the next couple of days. I'll let you know how that goes once I get done trouble shooting those steps.
I setup a new sever recently, or I should say I am in the process of setting it up. It will be running Windows 2003 Server and will eventually be used to host my web site. There in lies a tale as good as anything Jerry Pournelle would have written in his Chaos Manor column in the old Byte magazine.
I had some old sticks of RAM laying around and thought I would make use of them in the new server. So, I drove down to a local parts shop and showed him what I had. He only had one motherboard that would support the older RAM, so I took it, a 1.6 Gig Athlon processor, and a case. I could piece together everything else from the carcasses of several older PCs that are stacked up in the corner. Since this new processor is faster than the one I normally use, I figured that I would pull the drives, video controller, etc out of the current desktop and put them in the new case.
Everything went fine with the construction process. I plugged in the cables and turned on the power. That's when things got ugly. Windows reported that one of its required files was missing or corrupt. That's when I started to panic. No backup. But, I thought, the Windows XP setup program should be able to fix this. I located my Windows DVD, put it in the drive and ran setup, selecting the Repair option. I wonder if the option should be Maybe Repair, because it didn't fix anything. That meant I had to reinstall Windows. I was now an entire evening into the process and hadn't even gotten to the new server yet.
Well, the Windows install went better than anything else so far. There were no glitches. The only problem was, Windows was technically a new installation. That means I had to reinstall all my applications. That process took until 2:00 AM and most of the next day, but most everything was back in place. Luckily I hadn't lost any data.
Now, on to the server. I scavenged the parts and put them in the case. I had previously made a setup CD using the the images from my MSDN Universal DVD, but it wouldn't boot, even though it was supposed to be bootable. I got out my Win98 boot disk and booted from that, then started the setup process from the CD. Everything seemed to work. The keyword being "seemed". The server refused to boot from the harddrive.
So, back to the floppy. I reformatted the drive, then started the setup again. Again, everything started out ok, but during the step where setup copies files, it refused to read from the CD. Retry and Ignore did nothing, so back to the DVDs to burn a new CD. Thankfully, this one worked and the server was soon running.
You may know that Windows 2003 Server installs with pretty much everything turned off. I had to install IIS, Application Services, and the Theme service. This last service is what allows the UI to look like Windows XP. And that's where I am now...a week after starting the entire process. I'll actually plug the server into my network in the next couple of days. I'll let you know how that goes once I get done trouble shooting those steps.
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