A linuxchicks experience with Microsoft Windows Server 2008
Since it’s a new year and everything I find it natural that I do something noone would ever believe I would do, so I went off and installed VMware ESXi on one of my servers, created myself a virtual server and installed Microsoft Windows 2008 trail version. My goal is to setup a fully functional Active Directory Domain without any prior experience in Microsoft Active Directory. Active Directory is one of few thing I’m really curious about when it comes to Microsoft products, it’s so integrated in the system with single sign-on in difference to UNIX/Linux that I’m used to.
My first experience was that everything was very easy to install and all information I needed to configure the basics were provided in the configuration dialog. Everything went really smooth and easy until I had installed the Active Directory Service and Windows asked me to reboot. I did reboot and afterwards my Administrator password didn’t work, only solution: re-install…
After a nights sleep I’m back in the game with a new installation of Microsoft Windows Server 2008. I’m doing pretty much the same thing as yesterday with the difference that I’m not deadly tired this time. After the installation and configuration of Active Directory is done I restart my server and to my surprise everything works and after solving a minor DNS-issue my virtualized Microsoft Windows XP is now a part of the Active Directory Domain.
Microsoft Active Directory is easy to use and so simple to install that it could be done even for the smallest office that needs to centralize documents and/or programs. Why Linux/UNIX is so far behind when it comes to these kind of feature is a question and I believe it’s important that open source community do something about this in order to get Linux onto the desktops in offices world-wide.
It was barely a year since I said it last time: We still have a lot to learn from Microsoft and it’s not all about marketing.