Slashdot Mirror
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 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
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.
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?"
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.
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
Just having terminal services on a win2k box makes it a little odd. I would say its flaky, but I pretty sure that there is some manual I haven't read that would explain it. Lets just say that it is different , and I'm not just talking about using it remotely. Standing in the server room trying to install any random bit of software on a terminal services machine can make you feel like the machine is possessed by Larry Moe or Curly.
I have been using a combination of VNC and net meeting to run a w2k box in another city for the last year and a half. VNC is more reliable, Net meeting is faster ( and I can eavesdrop on the remote location too )
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
The UNIX model is to log in remotely, and run everything locally. The Windows 2000 model is to log in locally, and point the admin tools on the local machine to the remote one, and play with it through RPC.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.