It's been a while...

Hello everyone. Well, don't say I didn't give you fair warning about the frequency of posting on this blog.

Anyway, call it bad timing, but I started this blog about 8 weeks before the end of the semester. Four weeks later, of course, all the professors are cramming assignments down our throat trying to get in as much as they can because they realized that the semester is nearly over! To their credit, this semester was extremely compressed, partly due to the way the calendar fell this year and partly due to other reasons which I'm not going to expound upon at this time.

So the last five weeks were really busy and this was my first week back at work in a while as well. In addition, I've been meaning to continue my series of blog posts on the network infrastructure upgrade at work, but issues with VMware have kept me from making any progress on that front as well. I think I have those issues worked out now so that I can document the process.

Coming up...

I don't know how long it's going to take me before I post my next entry (hopefully no longer than a week) nor how long it may be in between posts, but, I hope to keep them coming. Here's what I plan on writing about in the near-term.

Installation of Windows 2003 SBS R2 Premium with SP2

I plan on detailing my implementation of Windows SBS 2003 Premium R2. Why SBS 2003? Well, a couple of reasons:

• This is my first ever ground-up network infrastructure deployment. This means that it's taking me a lot longer than it would for an experienced network engineer, especially since I'm figuring this stuff out all for myself. However, I have plenty of networking experience and feel confident in my ability. But if you should see anything that I'm doing wrong or feel I should do differently, I would love to hear from you.
• I started with Windows 2003 SBS R2 and have it installed in a testing environment right now. I can't very well just throw everything away to start over with Windows 2008 SBS, even though I would love to. Luckily, my hardware is 64-bit (Pentium D).
• I'm writing this blog on a 64-bit Toshiba laptop, but dumb Toshiba only installs 32-bit Vista OSes on their machines (as of late 2008). What gives?? Don't get me wrong, I love this laptop, I just wish I would have had a choice. In addition, the processor in this laptop does not have Intel's VMI, so I can't run a 64-bit guest OS on a 32-bit host. You know how it is, you load up a machine with all your apps (Visual Studio, Office, every other development/networking tool on the planet) and it would take you months to get your machine back to the way it is now if you have to reload (the only way to "upgrade" to a 64-bit OS).

So, I'm stuck with Windows SBS 2003. However, in a later series of posts, I may detail the installation of Windows 2008 SBS when/if I reload. Having said that, at this point, I think I'm going to wait for Windows 7 to come out to upgrade to that. So, then I might as well detail Windows 7 SBS. But that's at least a year out, and by then, I may not be doing anything regarding networking because I'm more of a coder.

Installing/Using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2008 (or 2010)

Once I detail my implementation of the core installation of Windows 2003 SBS, I'm going to delve into using the MDT 2008 (formerly BDD 2007) or MDT 2010, if it's out by then, for deploying Microsoft Windows Vista with SP1.

So that's it in a nutshell. That's what you can look forward to over the next few posts.