Monday, February 2, 2009

Installing Windows Server 2008 Core on Mac Mini

As a Mac-using Windows developer I have had for good measure a small and extremely low traffic OpenBSD web server running on an Apple Cube. It's been a fun project. The Cube happily runs headless on my shelf and lacking a fan is extremely quiet. I was intending to replace it with an Intel Mac Mini which is slightly louder but also a nice form factor and has a bit more grunt. Now I find myself needing to upskill my knowledge of Windows server products. I have in the past been responsible for maintaining and securing Internet-facing Windows 2003 servers. Time to transition to Windows Server 2008 Core Web.


An iso for W2K8 Web Server is available for download here. Leopard's Disk Utility can be used to burn the iso to a DVD. Microsoft allows the use of the software for trial purposes for a period of 60 days and provides instructions to extend that for a further 180 days. The attraction of the Web edition of W2K8 is the lowish price compared to their other server products. The limitation is the inability to run any Microsoft server products except IIS. For my purposes the limitation is not an issue.


So armed with the DVD, the next step is to partition the Mini using Boot Camp Assistant and boot from the install DVD. The install process is short and sweet, and fairly quickly the Windows login prompt is displayed. Unfortunately there's no indication what the initial username and password might be. Without referring to the documentation my first guess was that the initially entered values for username and password would be used as the identity for the administrator. No joy, no joy, fail. My second guess was correct, a username of Administrator and a blank password were accepted and a change password form displayed.


Having successfully signed on, the only UI provided with Core is a command prompt. Kind of daunting. First things first (apart from configuring the command prompt for useful defaults), how do I change the default computer name, configure an IP address, and access the Mini from my MBP using Microsoft© Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac.



Change the name of the computer:

C:\> netdom renamecomputer {current name} /NewName:{new name} (minus the curly braces).

Note a reboot is required before the new computer name will take effect:

C:\> shutdown /r /t 0

Setting the network configuration:

C:\>netsh interface ipv4 set address name="Local Area Connection" source=static address=10.20.1.250 mask=255.255.255.0 gateway=10.20.1.1

Allow access via RDC:

C:\> Cscript %windir%\system32\SCRegEdit.wsf /ar 0


So far so good. Unfortunately it's not as simple as unplugging the display, keyboard, and mouse from the Mini. The Mini requires a video signal in order to boot successfully. A simple hack using a resistor is required, details are available from Blackfriars.


OK, at this point I've just discovered that ASP.Net is not supported on Server Core. That seems like a fairly major oversight and a little googling reveals it will be supported in Windows Server 2008 R2 which is currently in beta. So time to go back and download the beta, which succeeded finally after 4 failed attempts I can only ascribe to gremlins.


Hurdles coming thick and fast now. There's no eject button on a Mac Mini; how to extract the disk currently resident in the drive? Sadly there is no obvious mechanism to do this from a command prompt and there are many vb scripts that instantiate a media player and issue it a command to eject the drive — not feasible on Windows 2008 Server Core. Fortunately there is a simple Mac mechanism that only requires the Mini to be restarted while holding down the left mouse button. Not exactly intuitive but achieves the desired result. Next, attempting to boot the Mini from the new disk displayed a prompt "Select CD-ROM Boot Type :" and no matter how hard I press either "1" or "2" the installation progresses no further. Without going into detail there is a solution. The first step is to download oscdimg.exe. This .exe is also available in the Windows Automated Installation Kit which is a 992.2 MB download. Next and using instructions borrowed from Sergio Mcfly, assuming your Parallels Vista install maps D:\ to the DVD drive in your MBP, run the following command oscdimg.exe -n -m -bd:\boot\etfsboot.com d:\ c:\w2k8r2Web.iso. Burn the resulting iso to a new DVD and the Mini now boots from the install disk.


This time, with a clean install, I don't have to guess the Administrator username. Instead I'm immediately prompted to set the password for Administrator and I now have a command prompt and the desktop background informs me I'm running Windows Web Server 7 For testing purposes only. Build 7000.

2 comments:

LOGIKonline said...

Impressive.. how is it coming a long? I have been considering undertaking this but am not sure given the hurdles one must overcome.

Robert, Inga, Hannah, Isaac & Lily said...

so it looks like it's quite possible to setup an office server on a mac mini - with wondows server 2008?