Commenting on my blog works again; Captcha issue resolved (a.k.a. disabled).
Didn't really do much in terms of preparation yesterday, just read over the IPv6 white paper. Today I fired up my Win2k8 Core VM and started to play around with IPv6. However, before getting to play, there was Product Activation. I had seen on one of the screencasts by Keith Combs that there is this vbs-tool (which you should probably know about on the exam): slmgr. Strange part was that when I checked the expiration date, it told me I had 26 days left, even though I had auto-activation on Internet connection checked when I installed. Well, must be one of those beta-thingies, but slmgr –ato toke care of the situation. Second thing I tried was installing the Virtual Machine additions. It didn’t auto-run, but manually going for setup.exe, installing and rebooting did give me the VW-additions.
Next I went through the commands and tools mentioned on the IPv6 config page. All well, I have ipconfig, route and netsh where the interface ipv6 will be important. Since IPv6 is said to be really easy auto configuring, I tried ping and it started with timed out requests. So much for easy, but knowing my environment (dual-homed Win2k8 VM with one interface connected on the physical interface of my Vista system and also a non-IPv6 ADSL-router plus a WinXP SP2 with IPv6 installed), I started troubleshooting with IPv4. Router okay, Vista okay, WinXP not okay (turned out to be the firewall, disabled it). Next I tried pinging the WinXP system again on IPv6, twice! The first Win2k8 VM always tried first on the non-connected interface (which has ZoneID 3), and then the connected interface with ZoneID 2. Same story when pinging the Vista host. Also Win2k8 quickly forgets the interface it used to successfully connect to the two clients. Forgetting about the interface to use is quickly solved by including the (local) zone ID though, which basically represents the interface trough which the other systems can be reached. So ping fe80::5581:4002:53a2:fef1%2 or something the likes based on your environment should prevent failure (or have a properly setup infrastructure ;) ) You can view what IPv6 knows about the surrounding network via netsh interface ipv6> show neighbors.
Pinging the Win2k8 WM from the two Windows clients didn’t work; again it’s the firewall which is enabled by default on Windows Server 2008. I disabled it through netsh firewall>set opmode DISABLE and pinging the connected interface worked, naturally pinging the disconnected interface doesn’t work as the server isn’t configured as router.
All of a sudden another question popped my mind (those poor 70-431 candidates completely taken by surprise): simulations!!! I didn’t read anything about them yet, so I Googled a bit and landed at Trika’s blog (where else ;) ): Are there simulations on the upgrade exams? No.
Afterwards I installed DHCP and DNS servers on the Win2k8 Core using ocsetup (warning: case-sensitve). DNS Server Service started, DHCP Server wouldn’t. The later indicating through net start “DHCP Server” it is disabled or has no associated devices. Trough netsh dhcp> I got the impression it needed Active Directory.
Not having a graphical UI in these circumstances is no help, so I wanted to see how far I could get from Vista… not far until I gave the administrator a password (not new to Windows Server 2008, but one to remember: a user account without password is inaccessible from the network (under the default policy settings)). Not much use either; I could initially connect with computer manager now, to have the errors thrown at my head one level deeper. I guess I will need a full install, partially to be able to manage the server and to be able to setup Active Directory. Now installing the new VM…