What I learned today at school...

Reminders:

• Just because you think you have pushed really hard on the RAM, video, and NIC cards, you probably haven't pushed hard enough.
• Vista and Windows 7 do not have telnet turned on by default. In order to communicate with the switch, this needs to be turned on first.
  

Adding layer 3 functionality to the switch (in Lyle's words because he said it best)

vlan 2 (This creates a new vlan - vlan 2)

ip interface vlan-2 address x.x.x.x mask 255.255.0.0 vlan 2 (The x.x.x.x IP address will be assigned to you and will be the ip address for port 1 on the switch)

ip static-route 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 gateway x.x.x.x (The x.x.x.x IP address here will be the next hop that packets will be forwarded to if they are undeliverable on the local switch)

vlan 2 port default 8/1 (This sets up the vlan 2 networking port to be on slot 8 port 1 on the switch and starts forwarding packets)

Other commands to remember:

• show vlan
• show ip interface

Websites for instructions on installing Win Server 2008:

Microsoft Corporation. (2008). Installing Windows Server 2008. Retrieved from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc755116%28WS.10%29.aspx

Petri IT Knowledgebase. (2011) How to install Windows Server 2008 step by step. Retrieved from http://www.petri.co.il/how-to-install-windows-server-2008-step-by-step.htm

Warren, S. (2007). How do I... Install and configure Windows Server 2008 core? Retrieved from http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/howdoi/how-do-i-install-and-configure-windows-server-2008-core/176

Impressions

It appears that installing the Server software is just like installing any other piece of software. It was a lot easier with Lyle to tell us what the settings should be. But what if you don’t know the settings?

I liked the web pages that included screen shots. These are much easier to follow than the Microsoft page, but it has more detailed information. I realize that that site is designed to be very technical, but would it have killed them to make it a bit more user friendly? (That’s a rhetorical question – we all know about Microsoft….)

“Things I did not know…” department

Pressing F12 forces the computer to boot from the DVD drive. Does this work for all machines, or just Dell? (I guess I don’t totally know, yet.)

Overall, things went pretty smoothly for us today. The nice thing about using a GUI is that many things have a standard way of functioning, for example entering data into a field instead of having to use a command prompt function. We lucked out in that our computers worked really well with the network, which made life much easier than previous days.