Windows Server 2008, Now with Network Capabilities!
April 16, 2008

I gave getting Windows Server 2008 setup another go over the weekend. After biting the bullet and actually scouring the Internet on my other machine which was hooked up to the Internet I was able to locate two happy little drivers for my NICs. I had to scavenge a CD-ROM drive for my now-Windows Server and buy a pack of CD-Rs to complete the process, but in the end I was left with a very nice machine. I have to say that the storage management is probably my favorite part of the new server as setting up a dynamic RAID array was a piece of cake. I was hoping for SAN functionality, but alas, Windows Server lacks this.

I'm now working on getting Virtual PC setup so that I can run all of my nice Linux services like mail, www and svn. I'm pretty psyched to get this whole setup completed so that my computing can settle down to normal.

Update - 2008-04-16

Huh. Windows Server 2008's firewall is kind of made of pewp. First off, Windows obviously adds eight million exceptions to the public interface but it doesn't even allow you to select multiple exceptions to make them only apply to the private interfaces. Nice. I love having my Active Directory published to the Internet. Secondly, it doesn't allow port forwarding. You can forward it at the public Internet level - but not internally. It's most unfortunate, because the only way to really test it is to go off site which also means that you have to update anything that depends on a specific domain whenever you're internal.

Suck. Oh well, it looks like I'm putting a real firewall in front of it to prevent this kind of BS from happening. It's most unfortunate that they didn't beef up the firewall much.

Windows Server 2008; That Was Fast
April 12, 2008

In honor of the giant snow storm that we got, I actually got a snowday from work. It was pretty nice, but I had to do something awesome with it to honor the awesomeness of getting a day off from work for snow. What was I going to do? Migrate my server from Linux to Windows Server 2008 of course! I know, too predictable... Anyway, I ended up spending the day migrating all of my files off the RAID array (which would have to be demolished for Windows) and onto various devices on my network with great glee. Somewhere around 1700 I finally got done and began the delicious installation. Surprisingly, it was a pretty fast install and only took about 20 unattended minutes.

After booting up the system I was pretty impressed with the general layout. The initial configuration tasks were pretty straight forward but something was missing. Something very important for server operating systems. Network interfaces. It's a curious thing, but Windows Server 2008 failed to pick up either of my two fairly common network cards (a Broadcom and a 3com) so... uh... I really couldn't do anything with it. To put this into perspective, OSX86 was able to pick up these two cards with no trouble at all.

So, final verdict? Windows Server needs to have the ability to do networking. I know, it's not that common - but some of us like to put our servers on a network. There's about 15 incredibly common chipsets out there that you should absolutely have support for - and there's really no excuse, considering that Linux does it and is open source. Anyway, I might revisit that disk at a later date with some drivers in hand but I'm just too annoyed with the lack of network support to bother right now.

Thank you.

How to Play Almost Any Movie in Windows
March 15, 2008

You've got a shiny Windows computer with an icon labeled "Media Player" and a video to play. Odds are, it won't. Windows Media Player by default only understands a very small subset of the possible formats that are out there - and most of that subset is unpopular. Watching movies under Windows really isn't that difficult though.

1. Download the Combined Community Codec Pack
2. Your movie should work.
3. If not, download the DivX codec.
4. Your movie should work. Tada!

If at all possible, try to use the program Media Player Classic which comes with the CCP.