Christos Polydorou

This is the third and final article of the series, following the  Windows Server 2012 R2 Core Setup Part 2,  where we will update the server with the latest updates. In many Windows Server Core installations, I've seen people use Corefig, a very easy and handy utility to configure many things on a core server. I'm not going to demonstrate that though because this is a Powershell only guide! Instead we are going to use a Powershell module for Windows Update named PSWindowsUpdate. After you download the file, unblock it using: UnBlock -File -Path .\PSWindowsUpdate.zip and extract the contents. When the extraction is finished, import the module using: Import-Module .\PSWindowsUpdate Use the path to the module's top level directory, that is the directory that contains all the files in order to import it. Now that we have the PSWindowsUpdate module installed, we will focus on two of the commands, Get-WUList and Get-WUInstall The first one wil...

Let's continue the Windows Server Core setup from where we left it in the previous article of the series! We will start by enabling the Remote Desktop firewall rules so you can connect to the server remotely: Enable-NetFirewallRule -DisplayGroup "Remote Desktop" Next, it's time to allow access to administrative file shares like c$ using: Enable-NetFirewallRule -DisplayGroup "File and Printer Sharing" Some monitoring systems use ping to test if a system is up, in that case we have to allow it through the firewall: Get-NetFirewallRule -Name FPS-ICMP4-* | Enable-NetFirewallRule Those rules are part of the File and Printer Sharing group and will be enabled if you enable the group. Now that we have allowed the Remote Desktop connections through the firewall, it's time to check if Remote Desktop is enabled and if not, enable it. First, we will use the following command to check if Remote Desktop is enabled: ( Get-ItemPro...

In this article I will show you the commands I usually use in order to configure a newly set up Windows Server 2012 R2 system. I know there are may other ways to do this like sconfig or corefig but I prefer native Powershell command. Let's start by renaming the computer with the command below: Rename-Computer -NewName Server1 A small note here, the name of the computer will not change until you reboot. If you want to reboot right after the cmdlet above completes just add the -Restart parameter. Next, I'm going to set the product key: slmgr -ipk productkeystring After the step above I like to configure the network settings. Let's start with renaming the network adapters. That way it is easier to tell which adapter is connected to which network: Rename-NetAdapter -NewName LAB_Data After renaming the adapters, it's time to assign some IP addresses! New-NetIPAddress -IPAddress 10.0.0.12 ` -InterfaceAlias LAB_Data ` -DefaultGateway 10.0.0.1 ` ...

I got a call today from a friend that had a strange issue when opening the Certification Authority mmc snap-in. When tried to open the certification authority he got the following message: Although this seems very serious, it is nothing other that expected. As it turns out, he was setting up a lab and part of the lab was testing the certificate services. After adding the role and features though, you have to finish the configuration. Right click on the yellow triangle on the top right of the Server Manager to get the respective prompt. After the configuration is complete, the MMC snap-in is working as expected.