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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?"
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
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.
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
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.
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
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