💾 Archived View for gem.kirigiri.me › gemlog › 2024-09-22.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 10:06:12. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-09-29)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
"How is this your idea of fun?!" You're probably asking. Well, I am a massive nerd at times, and today, I was bored. The afternoon was dull and the dog and kitten were asleep, with mum snoozing herself.
And I just so happened to have legitimate physical copies of the following:
I'd installed Server 2003 before, but never actually deployed Exchange.
This was dead easy. Installing from the disc took a while, but it eventually got there. Mine was the 32-bit copy of the OS so that will provide the most compatibility.
I used VirtualBox 7 (not 7.1) for the virtualisation environment here - it's been my long standing favourite for making virtual machines and is cross platform, so I can use it on Windows, macOS or Linux.
The guest additions image actually worked fine but did not provide audio, though for a server environment that's not needed.
I quickly located the SP1 and SP2 installers from Microsoft's update catalogue and installed them. After that I also blocked outbound traffic at the firewall level for that particular VM, as I had bridged it directly to my primary network.
I forgot one little detail that I remembered as I was poring through the Exchange Deployment Tools pages incuded on the Exchange disc... I needed Active Directory. Balls. I'd never done this before, save for a laugh nearly 10 years ago now and I remember jack shit.
Alrighty then... I whipped out the Server 2003 disc and began installing Active Directory Domain Services.
A screenshot of AD DS being configured, configuring DNS at that moment in time.
I input the details... FQDN (though it was a local one) being the most important. I then let it set to work, but it got stuck on DNS. I told it to skip after a bit, and I think that was a mistake for reasons you'll see later.
After a reboot I was presented with a good screen - my server was now a Domain Controller!
The completion screen of the AD DS portion of the Configure Your Server wizard.
Finally I ran the DCDiag and NetDiag tools to confirm all is well. It passed with flying colours. With Active Directory set up I could press on with Exchange.
Alrighty! Time to actually get on with it. But... wait a sec. Before Exchange could be deployed it turns out Active Directory's default schema isn't 'ready' for Exchange, and needs to be extended. This was a process called Exchange Forest Preparation, or ForestPrep for short:
Microsoft Exchange ForestPrep ongoing in the Exchange installation wizard.
Once that was done it also needed to do DomainPrep, but there's no screenshots of that. Sorry.
It's notable that these are all the same wizard by the looks, and it saves its progress during the deployment steps.
Eventually, we got to the final installation phase: installing Exchange Messaging & Collaboration Services:
The Exchange Installation Wizard installing Exchange Messaging & Collaboration Services.
Aaand it was at this point that... Xfce locked up to an extent. While I was on a different workspace. I was unable to switch to the first workspace to see how Exchange was doing. I tried numerous things online including restarting the Xfce panel but I was unable to click on anything, mouse input was simply being ignored. And so.. I rebooted the host, my desktop, and braced for the carnage that would surely ensue.
Ultimately there wasn't much. Exchange had mostly installed but things like IMAP and POP were not there, and the OWA was not installed in IIS. Re-running the final installation step of the Exchange install wizard and selecting 'reinstall' on Exchange 6.5 worked perfectly, and I then had a working copy of Exchange 2003 Standard.
I opened up AD Users & Computers and created a test user for myself. I initially tried to get an email client like Thunderbird or Gmail on my phone to work but neither worked through Exchange or even IMAP or POP. With that broken, I resorted to the OWA: Outlook Web Access.
I fired up Internet Exploder and went to the IP of the server, adding '/exchange' to the end - it asked me to authenticate. I put the domain credentials in... and after an age of waiting, the OWA fired up.
I sent a test email. I waited a little bit... and it came right back to me, as expected. It worked.
At the end of it I learned a bit about Active Directory and successfully deployed Exchange. However, IMAP, POP and any type of external access that was not from the server itself was in fact not working - I believe this was down to me skipping DNS configuration and it not being completely in place when I did that. You can ping the server from outside, but you just can't authenticate or anything. The best you can get is a 'This page is under construction' message from IIS (it's the default) or simply the sign-in prompt on the OWA when you try and authenticate, and fail.
I'm not sure where to go from there on that one, but it was a fun thing to do for an hour or two.
Goodbye for now, I'll be around.
