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?"

Comments

oh the contradiction

[Jeff Probst]

You don't want to see the pretty GUI that Microsoft has spent billions in developing? You heathen!

i thought the average slashbot said that microsoft stole the gui.

Bleeding edge

[dhopton]

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.

A little more elucidation on your first statement.

[epodrevol]

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.