Thursday, December 10, 2015

Installing Server OS on a Dell with a DRAC card and without a DVD Drive

Simple process for installing a server OS on a Dell server that came with a DRAC card (which I recommend in all cases).  

Download the ISO for the installation DVD (typically from the MS VLSC) such as the Windows 2012 R2 DVD ISO.

I recommend that you boot up the server and go through RAID configuration using Control - R to set up your RAID array before continuing.  RAID is not configurable inside Windows setup.

Open the DRAC web interface (default location is 192.168.0.120 with a username/password of root/calvin).  

Open a virtual console.

In the virtual console.

Click Virtual Media -> Connect Virtual Media






Click Virtual Media -> Map CD/DVD




















Choose the ISO file from your local machine (the ISO file should be located on your phsyical machine - not at all on the server).  I highly recommend you do this over a wired connection.  It'll take 20+ minutes over a wired connection to transfer the contents of a 6 GB ISO file and more than an hour over wireless.













In Next Boot, choose virtual CD/DVD/ISO.







Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Take ownership of a folder without affecting existing NTFS permissions

I'm not positive of the reason, but sometimes, when I take ownership of a folder (perhaps it has to do with applying ownership to all subfolders) all the existing permissions are gone.  Here's a DOS command you can run in an elevated command prompt on the server to adjust ownership without affecting existing NTFS permissions:

TAKEOWN /A /R /F c:\SomeFolder