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Windows Server 2008 RC2 setup review and notes – Configuration Basics

Now that we have our server installed let’s get rid of this pesky initial configuration tasks screen:

We’ll go through each item. Activating the server requires a valid product key for the edition of windows you’ve installed. If you’ve installed the wrong edition you’ll need to reinstall or do a repair install

if activation fails and you know that you’ve done everything right you’ll need to get on the horn with Microsoft.

Next setting we’re going to adjust is out network settings. I'm going to assign this machine a static IP address on our LAN. If you don’t need static IP and are using DHCP just leave this all as is:

Go to your network connections properties:

Highlighting IP V4 and go to properties:

I’m also going to set this machine up as a DNS server. Below are my IP address settings:

If you want to go advance you can add IP’s or tweak your DNS / WINS settings:

Lastly you’ll want to give your machine a name. I’m going to call my webtest1 for now:

We’re going to restart later as we have further configuration steps to make:

Windows update settings. We don’t like to use the default settings on our servers unless the server is not getting maintenance visits on a monthly basis, so we go manual settings:

We only need to change the windows update settings:

For this system I’m going with the following settings and am going to tweak our security settings so the machine doesn’t automatically reboot later:

If you want to control the updates and when there installed use the following setting:

In order to control how the windows updates are installed and to prevent the system from automatically rebooting we’ll need to create a custom management console or simply run gpedit.msc

Adding a snap-in and in order to adjust the local security policies you’ll need to add the group policy object editor:

Adding the local machine

Navigate to the windows update settings:

A quick look at the settings we’re using in this build:

And details on the configurations – this will auto install updates that don’t cause the system to have to reboot:

Similar to what you see in the auto update screens:

This will prevent machine from rebooting while someone's logged in. This will make it so that our server will never automatically reboot as we’ll always have a a user logged in.

This will nag the user to install the updates.

That covers just about everything in the initial configuration task. You should now create any local accounts now if you want, enable RDP (we’ll cover that later) as well as disable or rename the administrator account now and your all set. Now you can move onto building the server now that you have your initial configuration done. You can check the box below so that this screen stops coming up upon boot: