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Headless Windows 2000 Servers?
Ichabod Gates asks: "I have a home network with a few Windows 2000 servers that I run without monitors/keyboards/etc. the only cables attached are power and network. The servers are P200's with not enough RAM and whatever spare parts I can scrounge up for them and I admin them all using terminal services. Everything works fine and the uptimes are decent enough considering the power problems here. Due to a fixed frequency 19inch monitor, I had to shuffle video cards around till I found one that suited. This led me to attempt to remove all the unnecessary cards from the servers, just to make some spare parts available. This went fine until it became time to remove the VGA cards: the machines proceeded to boot up to the point where they would respond to ping requests, but then they'd reboot and repeat the process. I've had a reasonable search around and haven't found any definitive statement that says Windows 2000 can't run without a VGA card." What? You don't want to see the pretty GUI that Microsoft has spent billions in developing? You heathen!
"I have found a page saying that the Windows after XP will be the first to make it possible. There are expensive Compaq cards that make it possible I believe. but I think they require certain servers, and besides, my budget is $0. I am just wondering if the Slashdot community could offer any suggestions or leads?"
It's a limitation in most PC bioses, that you must have a video card to be able to boot. Any old card will do. My suggestion -- buy some old S3 Virge cards, for like $15 a piece.
Also, if you still want to use the Windows GUI, try VNC.
have you tried that? sometimes the bios will tell windows to expect video. also, try disableing the video drivers in device manager, and then removing the card.
:)
you could also use linux/bsd/*nix
Maybe if our editors stopped mocking the users with stuff like that crack about the 2k GUI (which I happen to like a whole lot), we'd have some quality shit going on here.
I dunno. I just really wish they'd stop posting little one-liners after the text of the submission either a:mocking the poster, or b:saying something inane like "I only use windows for games, internet surfing, graphic design, sound editing, mp3 ripping and site authoring, but this looks cool, once Bill Gates comes and personally gives me a handjob while lining my birdcage with the XP source code."
I know your budget is $0, but if you can spare a few bucks you can get video cards for $2/ea.
I poked around microsoft's site and found this kb article about building server appliances, which may or may not meet your needs. I did notice that the hardware requirements for w2k pro, w2k server, w2k advanced server, xp, and xp pro all listed VGA display adapters as a requirement. I *think* that you may be able to get win2k datacenter servers without VGA boards, but those boxes are all designed around the vendors hardware so it would probably be pretty easy for them to drop VGA support if they didn't want it. I did think it was funny that Microsoft Services for Unix was a requirement for installing their Server Appliance Kit. I kind of expected them to use CIFS instead of NFS for some reason..... :)
If I were you I'd just throw some cheap VGA board in there and not plug a monitor in. That way you can remote admin it with VNC or Terminal Services or pc anywhere(ugh!) or whatever, but if you run into "big trouble" you can always plug in a monitor/keyboard/mouse. Win2k is ROCK SOLID so I don't think you'll ever have problems with it
i thought the average slashbot said that microsoft stole the gui.
How sure am I? Well, before I left Microsoft, I was a developer working on headless support for Windows XP (work that I think will first appear in the server version of XP, which I think is going to be called Windows .NET server). And the dependency was there then in the shipped Windows 2000, so unless it was removed in a service pack, it is still there.
Actually I'm surprised you can even get the machine booted far enough to ping it.
There were some BIOSes out there that allow booting without VGA so it's not a pure BIOS limitation.
There is a guide to "lights out operation" (a term Microsoft sometimes uses which may help you in your search) posted here on Microsoft's site. It is interesting for its hardware solutions but it is 3 years old and covers NT 4 (which did not have the VGA requirement).
- adam
The Server Appliance Kit, though it lists a VGA board as a requirement, claims to install null drivers for the video board. It probably just needs a VGA board for the initial configuration, after which you'd make your system image and copy it to your thousands of other units (it is an OEM product, you know). But, since none of the products it's designed for would have any reason for having a head, it wouldn't be an operational requirement. And the cost is very much in line with your stated budget for the project.
there goes the neighborhood. I mean really, just buy a freakin' 2M trident and get on with your life. preferably withOUT windows 2k server. bloat much?
Budget $0
Windows 2000 Server - $700
Now, his budget is $0 yet he managed to cough up $700 for EACH $150 MACHINE? Sorry guy, but next time just cough up $20 for a cheap video card. You don't even need a monitor to install something like the NVIDIA 128ZX($25 after shipping), drivers are already there. Just hit enter a few times after its been up a while and restart.
Mod me to hell, whatever. You know this is what is really going on.
True dat.
Some BIOSes won't boot without a video card. Some will. On the old Pentium motherboard I gained from upgrading my fiancee's machine, the original bios wouldn't allow booting without a vga card, but an upgraded bios (free from the website, of course), did.
With an old 10 mbit ISA ethernet card, a 2 gig hard drive, and a debian boot disk, I configured a nice little stand-alone server, although I used a VGA card for setup. Tom's Linux Boot Disk (google for tomsrtbt) will auto-detect some NICs, and grab an IP address from DHCP automagically, so, with a bit of hacking, its probably possible to make a varient of tomsrtbt that allows SSH or telnet login, which would allow setup of a machine without a video card. My current headless linux box runs without a video card, floppy drive, or cd drive, although I'm using a windows machine with file sharing to fake a floppy and cd drive. :) It works perfectly, save for a small bug where my wtmp logs seems to fill up with garbage. (I think inetd is trying to launch login sessions to the vga terminals, and dying in odd yet wonderful ways that it never expected too). All in all, headless linux is a wonderful way of doing things, and a pure headless machine does increase physical security.
Windows is a little braindead about video cards. For those of you that think an old 1 meg VGA video card will work, it doesn't really. Windows terminal services will only support whatever resolution that the physical vid card will support. However, other then needing a video card that can support the resolution you want to use, headless windows is workable. I ran a win2k adv. server at home for about 2 weeks as a headless DHCP/test server. (Yes, it was a legit copy, we had one from microsoft's big bag of shit that they'll send resalers for a reasonable price ($500/year)). One word of warning - I can upgrade a headless linux box with relative ease : for example, from debian stable to testing, and convert the filesystem to ext2 to ext3, without ever hooking up a monitor. However, I've seen windows machines pop up error messages to the local display without sending it to any terminal services displays, and I wouldn't be surpised if windows would pop up a prompt before it launched the terminal services server, which should effectively freeze a machine from remote access. My test server never BSOD, so I don't know how it handles that remotely (my guess is poorly though).
For a lark, I would run windows headless (or in my case, because I wanted a test machine and ran out of monitors & desktop space), but for serious work, especially remote administration, my advice is: don't! Bad things will probably happen, and if your business depends on high uptimes, you'll be road tripping to see those remote machines sooner or later. :) Stick with linux, remote administration is possible, including software upgrades and patches. Properly administered, a linux machine shouldn't need physical maintainance except for hardware. (Assuming you do have your server on a UPS, but you do, right?)
Just my $.02
~ Das
I can't stand these "please help me. I want to get blood from a stone" Ask Slashdots. Sometimes you have to spend some money to get things to work satisfactorily. A PC simply will not boot without a video card. Buy one for each of your servers; a nasty old one can't cost more than $5. If you can't afford $25 or so, what on earth are you doing building computers with Win2K on them to begin with? (You *did* pay for that, didn't you?)
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
While you have a VGA card and monitor attached so you can see what you are doing, delete the drivers for the video card and monitor, shut down, remove the video card, then restart.
Okay, this isn't a troll...I'm just curious - I'm a 100% Unix guy, and I'd just like to know what remote-administration options are built-in with Windows. I know you can use PCAnywhere, but I don't understand how anyone could consider it a "server OS" if you can't administer the damn thing remotely.
(Like I said, if you can administer it remotely, then I'd love to be proven wrong...)
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
Well, if you're removing extra hardware, how come you're not removing extra software too, for example... windows 2000...
Now onto the question... recently switched a 2k box to linux, runs fine. Except one problem. It doesn't like connecting to the network. it's running Mandrake 8.1, and works beautifully otherwise with VNC/Telnet/FTP to acess it. just need to connect it to a monitor to kick the network back in... any ideas?
Known fault
k b; EN-US;q312066
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=
It suggests getting a fixed ntldr from MS for free, but you can use the NT ntldr with 2k no probs (certainly on WS/Pro), so you may want to try the NT one first.
If you dont mind trying the "bleeding edge" you could call up your local MS subsib, and see if you can get a trial version of the beta of Windows.net server which will support being headless.
As a side point, Win2k *does* support being headless - some of the SAN devices run Win2k Server Appliance Kit.
Wait for Dot-NET Server.
It will have to work headless, or it will not work with blade-servers.
If your budget is Zero, though, I suggest "other" Operating Systems, that have had no problems running headless for years
;-)
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Just get a bunch of cheap old 2-4mb vga cards and throw them in just to shut it up. Consider yourself lucky the BIOS even lets you boot without a vga, most of them will just sit there and beep in panic.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Just put in 2 Video cards. The one that works with your monitor for configuration purposes, then the other card for when you want to run the machine.
-- Tim
TKrabec Pahh
It's a limitation in most PC bioses, that you must have a video card to be able to boot.
No, it isn't.
I've built 386 routers without video cards.
Get your facts straight.
I know Linux is not the topic of this thread, but what I have to say is about the underlying hardware, and not the OS:
:-)
I run an always-on linux box at home (typical home gateway: masquerading firewall + DHCP + DNS + file server + SETI cruncher) and keep it in a quite tiny closet with almost no ventilation, so I wanted to run it *really* headless (no vid card at all) to also have a little thermal advantage (apart from freeing an IRQ). You know, serial console, serial LILO, getty on ttyS0.
I've upgraded the mobo+CPU a couple times in the last years, and some mobos DO work without a vidcard at all (current Asus A7V333, previous Microstar K7266pro) while others (Soltek SL-75KAV) just wouldn't boot. (No, I didn't forget to set it up in the bios!).
So, be sure the HARDWARE supports it!
The fact that you insist on running the wrong OS on it is a whole different story then
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
You generally only need to attend to your headless machine when something goes wrong. So guess what goes wrong a lot...the network! So much for Terminal Services. Unless you have a second net card on an internal net (which you might want to have anyway as opposed to leaving a Terminal Services session on your public network)...but as you can see people care about having a *VGA* card in their servers, a second net card is even more $$$. If you are trying to get a 1U server in a rack, every bit of hardware counts.
Anyway the proper way to do headless is over a serial port, to a command-line prompt. Sun boxes have a dedicated port for this; x86 Unix machines do this over a standard serial port; there are some non-Microsoft products for Windows 2000 that do this, providing a command-prompt you can connect to over a serial port, but they are hampered by a) the lack of command-line tools and b) the fact that they don't run at elevated priority so they won't work for a lot of hung systems. This should be much improved with .NET Server.
- adam
You cannot boot Windows NT 3.51, NT 4.0, W2K, or XP w/o a video driver. They just won't do it, "out of the box".
The "embedded" versions of Windows NT (NT Embedded 4.0, the W2K SAK, or XP Embedded) contain a "Null VGA" driver that allows them to boot w/o a video card (also contain keyboard and mouse drivers that do the same). Take a look here for a marketroid overview, or here for a FAQ on NT Embedded 4.0 (Search for "Null" if you want to see the "headless operation" part-- I find it particularly interesting that they have an option for a serial console). (These "null" drivers were acquired from a 3rd party by Microsoft. I've looked at the DDK, and actually, it wouldn't be all that hard to implement a "null" driver for those services... maybe I ought to think about that.)
For those who are development minded, it's worth it to take a look around the NT "embedded" pages at Microsoft. I really like the NT kernel (not the bag-of-crap that is Win32, mind you), and I like that Microsoft is letting you strip out the crap "features" and run "bare metal" on the native-mode kernel if you want.
(I've always been convinced there's a Unix inside NT trying to get out... *grin* I'd love to roll an "NT distribution" that stripped out the GUI, and booted the Interix subsystem w/o Win32... Oh, well... I guess I'll just stick to tinkering w/ Linux.)
The Attitude Adjuster, I hate me, you can too.
You have video cards for all the servers as your post would indicate, why do you suddenly want to remove them? Windows is inherently a GUI OS, hence the name, Windows. If you don't want a GUI, don't use Windows.
And why do you have 5 Win2k servers in your home network? Re-evaluate your situation instead of trying to make it as complex as possible, there is simply no need for 5 Win2k servers in a home network.
I like Windows for certain things, and I like Linux for certain things. But I never try to make one run like the other because that's not the point. Removing video from Windows is not normal and should never be expected to work. Any solution where it seems to work is just asking for problems as you are straying from it's designed use.
read the headline as "Heedless Windows 2000 Servers"?
Black holes are where God divided by zero
hey daniel,
e a. html#Product%20Pricing
now maybe he didn't pay for his software, but you make it sound like it's absolutely IMPOSSIBLE he obtained his software legally.
read on you f'n moron
http://www.uthscsa.edu/business/genservices/msc
ever heard of a company sponsored microsoft developer? We have 4 of them on our staff. They get their software from microsoft, and they can run anything they are sent (which is everything) till 2005 or so.
Also, he could be ANYONE who is associated with a university. Hell in the town i live in, there are several colleges, and anyone who works there or is a student has access to cheap software. in this town that's a couple hundred thousand people.
look at these prices
Product Descriptions
Windows XP for Students - $5
Windows XP for Faculty - $5
FrontPage 98, $5
FrontPage (Macintosh), $5
Office XP Pro, $15
Office 2000 SR 1A (update), $5
Office 2001 (Macintosh), $5
Office 98 (Macintosh), $5
Visual Studio Pro v.6, $25
Visual Studio Pro SP4 (update), $5
Windows 2000 Pro, $5
Windows 2000 Pro SP1 (update), $5
Windows NT, $5
Windows 98, $5
and there's more available if you actually go to the book store.
i don't want to see no more posts from you mr. loudmouth.
shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I run several 2000 and NT servers that dont need VGA to boot. In the boot.ini (NT Loader cfg file) there is an option you can set for VGA Mode ( "/basevideo /sos"). This is the equivalent of Safe mode for NT and 2000, reducing the res + color pallette to 640x480@60 with 16 colors. It never has had anything to do with NT's detection of video HW, it just uses a basic driver in case you borked the refresh rate or something else.
Terminal services needs to show you a desktop. If it cant load one itself or any video subsystem on the local machine, then how can it get the values to draw you a desktop remotely?
Video driver fail...All dependent apps + services fail... Pinging is a network service, not dependent upon a gui. I'll bet you can even get to files and other services on that machine.
You may want to throw a VGA card in there and configure a telnet server for 2000 and see if you can hit that from a workstation and get stuff done that way.
-I Hate my job, shove it.
"I am a warrior, and information is my weapon..."
That was a pretty good three liner. Except for the run on sentence.
For the reasons outlined in other posts you'll still need a video card.. but you wont need anything plugged into it.
You can configure linux with serial console support and then run vmware on it with windows server inside it.
We do this at work on many servers with great success.