Dear Reader,
Having setup and installed Servers for most of our clients all
over Liberia such as, Water Aid- Liberia,
Populations Services International-Liberia,
Tetra-Tech ARD, Equatorial Palm Oil etc. on numerous occasions without any
headache, last month January 20, Saturday morning was an experience a System
Administrator wouldn’t want to miss or get to the bottom of.
An order arrived in our office by DHL that morning for a
customer named Master Trading dealer in auto mechanic and spare parts located
on the same street we are located. An
instruction was given to us from our Head of Operations to unpack and set up
the server for installation at the client site.
As techies, my colleague and I removed the item out of the
box (HP ProLiant 360 dl 360 Server G8, 1x4
TB HDD, 16GB RAM, Intel/Dual Processor and a RAID Array System already
installed.
The power cord of the server was plug into the electrical
outlet and to the power port of the Server. It booted up smoothly showing no
operating system installed. I quickly arranged my Windows Server 2008 R2
software disc and inserted it into the CD ROM of the server, and booted from CD
in the boot setting. It started up well where I could select the edition of
Windows (Server 2008 64bits Standard Edition). In the process of installing,
the software should detect each of the 1TB in total of 4 drives in other to
select which one the OS is to be installed on, but in the process, it displayed
the error message on the screen shown below:
I tried several times of installing the OS using different
CDs and bootable USB drive, but the problem persisted. I did many online research
on the error message but couldn’t find a suitable solution. All I could see from
other websites was to download and update some device drivers which I did
download but that didn’t work as well.
This drew my colleague, Farman Elahi attention after
verifying that all the hard drives installed were brand new and reading from
our HDD tester. He entered into the BIOS and System setting from one option to
another until he found ‘’Enable RAID ARRAY’’ and then he hit enter. The option
was enabled, and the system prompted a restart. Because the Server was running
a RAID security, all HDD would show invisible until they were enabled.
During this restart all the 4TB hard drives
read and an option to select which drive to install the OS was shown. Many
thanks to Mr. Farman my colleague who came in during the middle of my server
installation nightmare. As a team, together everyone accomplishes a mission.
The software installed successfully enabling me to complete the below necessary
configurations.
1. Connect to mains
and network switch – allow for a network cable.
2. Install
Windows Server 2008 R2Standard Edition and Server name Administrator
3. Configure
server with static IP address.
4. Run
DCPromo.exe and install basic domain
5. Configure
DNS on the server – set it up with forwarder details of local ISP’s DNS or
Google 8.8.8.8
6. I set the
local DNS of the Server to point to its own IP address and not the ISP or
Google’s.
7. Add all workstations
to the domain and create usernames and password for users,
8. Copy existing profiles
into the new domain profile.
9. Users are set to local
administrators for their workstations.
10. Set up network share
for HP and Dell printer and, a folder. (username: admin PW: *****)
11. Test connectivity of
all workstations to share.
12. Set up router to
allow connection to the server via the internet for support purposes –
Port redirection (3389) to the server IP
address.
13.
Installed TeamViewer Host 10 on the server for outside support or remote login
A week later, the customer requested a remote desktop
connection configured on the server. In the server manager, I installed the
remote desktop feature. Got back to the user’s laptop, entered username and
password an error message pop up! “cannot connect remote desktop, you must add
the user in the group manually or use terminal service” In resolving this I
click on “Start”, right click on Computer and click ‘’Properties”. Click on add
users. Like for the client I created a login credential in the Active Directory
called ‘Admin’ so when I click on ‘Add’ I selected Admin, click Apply and Ok.
Restarted the server and all was okay with the end-user. Thanks to my colleague
Farman who helped me cross the first level of all these configurations.
by Daniel Collins
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