Useless Inc. - Installation difficulties in the Windows ecosystem

Sunday, August 05, 2007

Installation difficulties in the Windows ecosystem

A new organization and a new office require a new IT infrastructure. I'll spare you the gritty details and just mention several installation issues we've encountered and how to resolve them.

	Problem:	Windows Server 2003 installed on a RAID array via NVidia RAID controller; drivers are not available on the regular installation CD-ROM.
	Solution:	Use a USB floppy drive (most servers and workstations don't come with floppy drives nowadays, and with good reason). In the case of the Tyan server we use, booting off of the driver CD allowed me to create a driver floppy which I then used when installing Windows.

	Problem:	Windows can't locate file "nvraid.cat" when using the NVidia RAID controller drivers.
	Solution:	Hit the escape button to ignore the missing files (apparently that .CAT files are used for cryptographic purposes and are not provided by NVidia, see here).

	Problem:	Nero refuses to install without installing DirectX 9.0c first on Windows Vista.
	Solution:	Although Vista comes with DirectX 10, you can safely agree to this and skip the DirectX installation later. Why a CD/DVD burning package requires DirectX (even though I didn't install any of the additional crap provided by Nero) is beyond me.

	Problem:	Not strictly an installation issue, but there isn't any immediately apparent way to echo an empty line from the Windows command processor.
	Solution:	While "echo /?" won't tell you this, the MSDN documentation for the same command clearly mentions "echo." (written exactly so). Contrived.

	Problem:	Setting up a DNS canonical name (alias) entry for a file server results in "Duplicate name exists on the network." errors when attempting to use the network resource.
	Solution:	Find registry key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters" and set the value of "DisableStrictNameChecking" to 1. (More information)

	Problem:	Newly configured DHCP server doesn't respond to "ipconfig /renew" requests.
	Solution:	Although I can't explain this, the problem was not the DHCP server; right-clicking the network connection icon and then selecting Repair did actually manage to obtain a lease. If this happens to you, don't get upset (as I did), try this technique first and see if it works for you.

I'll add a separate post on TFS and eScrum later today or tomorrow (hopefully).

Sunday, August 05, 2007 9:20:55 AM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)

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