Chapter 12: Backing Up

Chapter 12 dealt with something that many of us don't do often enough: backing up. In truth, the importance of backup is directly proportional to the importance of the data being backed up. My save game files in Dragon Age: Origins are not exactly critical data, for example. The chapter and class lecture covered several different ways of backing up, be it from the GUI console or the command line, but the takeaway I have from this chapter is that I really should invest in a third-party utility if I want to back up data on servers. The Windows Server options are pretty basic.

Chapter 11: Monitoring Servers

Chapter 11 dealt with, shock of shocks, monitoring servers. (Gee, bet you weren't expecting that from the title!) In any case, the lab had me mostly in the reliability and performance utrility, building different graphs and data collectors. The most important takeaway from this lesson was, at least to me:  Be careful what you put on the same graph. Things that are percentage based will only have a value of 0-100 (Sadly for the Spinal Taps of the computing world, the hardware in a PC, even a server, does not go to 11.) whereas other things will be measured in units that can go WAY past 100. However, even if you do put things with different ceilings together on the same graph, you'll still at least be able to see where the spikes are.

Chapter 10: Managing Servers

Chapter 10 dealt with the day-to-day tasks of managing a server and keeping it in good shape, such as updates and remote access. The lab was one of the lightest and fastest of the entire semester; there's just not all that much to, for instance, Remote Desktop from a user standpoint, though it is a very useful feature. (I use it a bit at home to play around with my mostly-unused server - I need to get some more storage for that thing one of these days so I can use it as a file and media server, because right now, I don't have much else in the way of use for it.)

Chapter 9: Securing Infrastructure Services

Chapter 9 dealt with some of the higher-level types of security, such as Certificates and Certificate Authorities as well as VPNs and remote access. Of these two concepts, I must admit I find remote access to be of considerably greater interest; while Certificates are extremely important for security purposes, the idea of being able to securely access my home network while out roaming around has always appealed to me. Maybe I've found a use for my languishing server box after all.

Chapter 8: Planning Server and Network Security

Chapter 8 dealt with security. I was a little sad that the lab for this chapter didn't deal with firewall settings at all, but what it did do was vividly demonstrate what happens if you aren't careful in setting permissions at every step along the way. It's entirely possible to lock users out of stuff they need to be able to access and change, which can hurt user productivity, not to mention make double work for an admin. I've lost some interest in security lately as it's begun to seem like a losing battle; the bad guys are worming into little cracks and crevasses in user systems more and more every day. Still, in a corporate setting, it's important to lock the system down as tightly as possible to protect precious IP from threats both internal and external, so this chapter was useful.

Chapter 7: Planning for High Availablity

In the lab from this chapter, I got to play around with server clustering. I knew in an abstract way what it was, but it was cool to get my proverbial hands dirty. It's amazing to me how many technologies dealing with various kind of redundancies have sprung up in the modern era. RAID, clusters, failover, shadow copies, and so forth are all there to make sure that precious data is not lost and is always available. Who would have thought we'd be here back in 1980? I think the thing that impressed me most was how low-hassle a process setting up a cluster is. Pick an unused IP address, attach some hosts and Windows takes care of the rest. I am going to have to go back through the chapter and see if I can figure out why I wasn't able to use the configured URL for the cluster, though. I have a feeling that's important.

Chapter 6: Planning Storage Solutions

This chapter dealt with some of the more practical and day-to-day tasks of managing storage for users. I found the lab to be a little embarrassing in retrospect; I'm not using the drives on my home PC anywhere near as well as I could be. The lab also went faster than most, because I've already played around with some of the stuff it covers. The biggest thing that stood out to me about this time was the casual use of spanned volumes for the accounting department. That kind of made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. This fictional Contoso company is going to trust their finance files to a spanned volume involving multiple physical disks? Really? That's a little scary utterly terrifying. Hope they've got a really good backup scheme!

Chapter 5: File and Print Services

Well, this was the chapter that did it. I "pulled the trigger" and set up a server on an old box on my home network. I haven't done much with it yet, but there you go.

Anyway, this chapter dealt with  file and print services. I learned about hard and soft limits on storage, permissions for various groups with respect to stored files and DFS. Neat stuff. The chapter also covered print services, which is probably the most useful and practical (if not the most fun) thing I can do with a server at home. The chapter gave me a new appreciation for just what an unholy nightmare it must be for people who write software for printers, because the process of simply printing a document travels through a lot more sub-components of the OS than I had originally thought.

Chapter 4: Planning Application Services

This is where the "sexy" stuff comes in, at least for me. Application services can do all kinds of cool things, some of which might be fun to have on my home network. (Though Hyper-V is not one of them, cool though virtualization is!) I'm starting to think of setting up a server for file and printer sharing, and I wonder if I could get Amazon Unbox to run across my network? The chapter also goes into some depth concerning deploying applications through the web server role using IIS7 (good for anything that can run in a browser, which is more and more every day), and also touches on UDDI, print server, fax, and media services roles. One thing I found interesting was that Microsoft server applications are set up in such a way as to not need the Application Server role, which kind of surprised me on one level and wasn't surprising at all on another.

Note to self: Streaming Media Services are a downloadable update, not a part of the server OS!

Still haven't decided whether to "pull the trigger" on a server on the home network, but it's looking more likely.

Chapter 3: Planning an Active Directory Deployment

Chapter 3 covered the finer points of active directory. I don't think, before I did the lab, that I really appreciated what a huge difference different directory structures can make on a network, though the lab did an excellent job of making that clear. A well-thought-out directory infrastructure has obvious advantages in terms of usability and security. This chapter is about the point where I've started to entertain the idea of slapping the MSDN academic alliance license of server 2008 on an old computer I've got at home and actually using it. We'll see if I go through with that plan. At present I haven't done anything with it yet.

Chapter 2: Planning Infrastructure Services

Chapter 2 covered the mapping and addressing side of a server-equipped network, specifically the finer points of DNS and DHCP. The chapter also covered things like setting a network up in a fault-tolerant way  (Redundancy is your friend!) and, also related, covered distributed DHCP.

Chapter 1: Planning Server Deployments

It's not hard to see why the authors of the book led with this! The first chapter deals with the various hardware and logistical concerns that surround a server deployment, and also the tools that Windows Server 2008 provides for making them easier. I'm sure much of this was old news to some of my classmates, but as someone new to the server world, I found the information valuable and useful. The MAP tool in particular seems as though it'd be a godsend. The lab and chapter also covered remote deployment services, which I found to be pretty cool.

Introduction

I'm Peter Martin, an IT student at MCC in Crystal Lake, IL. I'm 32 years old, and currently work in retail with some occasional computer side work. I'm taking this class to build up my spread of marketable IT skills so I can get a career doing what I love: playing with technology.

Quick note to Mike:

All of my labs have cropped images in them because this is my desktop (a 23 inch display and 2 17 inchers - LOTS of irrelevant screen space for lab purposes.):