IT Leadership: Installing Windows 7 Clients

My daughter once told me, the year she worked in Montreal, that she knew she had moved over to French as her first language when she began to dream in French. I have dreamt about DHCP and DNS and numbers in octet format all weekend. I wonder, am I having nightmares, or simply transitioning into binary as my first language.

We began our day with a couple of tasks to cleanup our Server install.

1. We needed to enable remote desktop services. This will allow us to connect to our server remotely from our workstations. To accomplish this:
Start/system properties/remote/select allow connect
To use the server command prompt type oobe
2. In order for our active directory to function properly we needed to set our DHCP Server options to point to 192.168.181.50. To accomplish this:
DHCP services /server options/ general add this dns 192.168.181.50.
(This becomes the second DNS address in our protocol ( the first dns address is our local server 192.168.10.50, the second is the Lyles server 192.168.181.50) as well as 142.66.33.100and 142.66.33.101)

Today we were to set up two Windows 7 Enterprise workstations. The wizard on Windows 7 makes this a fairly painless exercise.

1. Put the Windows 7 system CD in the CD/DVD player.

2. Hard start the workstation and press F12 until you see the Boot menu.

3. Choose Boot from DVD

4. The wizard next asks you to choose the language options:

Language: English

Time & Currency: English (US)

Keyboard: US

After accepting these options choose Next, followed by the Install Now button.

5. The wizard next wants you to accept the license terms, click the I accept the License terms and click Next.

6. The next step is to determine where you want to install Windows. It is usually a good choice to accept the default. I did and clicked OK.

7. The installation wizard then went about its business installing Windows. There were two restarts during this process.

8. After the second restart, the wizard required me to enter a Username for the administrator account, a password and a computer name. My partner, John, and I chose:

Username: admin

Computer Name: JS-BTL83630 (We chose to implement a naming protocol. All our workstations will begin with JS (the name of our network) and the computer number (as listed on the sticky label by U of L tech staff) This will allow a quick identification of workstation for technical staff when troubleshooting)

Password: admin5769 (There was a mandatory retype password to ensure consistency)

Type a password hint: Ask Lyle

9. The wizard then asked about automatic updates. We chose to use the recommended settings.

10. We next reviewed our time and date settings. We needed to change from Pacific to Mountain time. The time was correct. Click Next.

11. To set up the network, we choose Work Network.

12. We next went to the Device Manager on the Control Panel and learned that we were missing two devices - (1) PCI Serial Port; and (2) Communications Manager. We had learned that these were part of the chipset drivers for the Optiplex 755. We then went to the support.dell.com website and downloaded the chipset drivers for the Vista 32 bit operating system (Win 7 was not available and Dell recommended this download for Win 7 workstations).

13. We next needed to authenticate our software with the proper activation key. To accomplish this we right-clicked on My Computer, went to the Windows Activation section and clicked change. I will not put the activation key as it belongs to prrsd. However, we were successfully activated. Woohoo.

14. Our last step in setting up our workstations was to ensure that we completed all updates. This took several restarts. Everytime we thought we were complete, Windows would find more updates.

15. When both workstations were complete, we were to verify through the Windows File Manager that we could see our entire network. On this task we failed and my obsessive tendencies reared their ugly head. We can see all our workstations and we can ping our server or enter the address for our server and communicate; however file manager will not show our server. I spent the noon hour verifying our DNS and DHCP settings; cross-referencing our notes, and Sean and Rocky's servers. The same. So I spent my afternoon Googling possible troubleshooting measures. I did find that this is a common error on Win 7. Some of the possible fixes are:

1. Make sure network discover is turned on

2. Add the client to the Host file

3. Ping Server name: JSServer10

4. Disable IPv6 in adapter properties on workstation

5. Change workgroup name

6. Add computer description on workstation (do not leave blank)

7. disable Homegroup network settings

8. Add DNS addresses manually in IPv4 settings

During the pm coffee break, I tried #4,5,6 to no avail. This saga is to be continued.....