It is enabled by default. You can audit in much more in depth using Tripwire; consider this for your highest-risk systems. Modern versions of Tripwire require the purchase of licenses in order to use it. The Tripwire management console can be very helpful for managing more complex installations.

Windows Server Hardening Checklist. How to Use the Checklist Print the checklist and check off each item you complete to ensure that you cover the critical steps for securing your server. Server Information. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy Accessibility Policy. If machine is a new install, protect it from hostile network traffic, until the operating system is installed and hardened.

Restrict the ability to access this computer from the network to Administrators and Authenticated Users.

Configure log shipping e. Configure all Linux elements according to the Linux Hardening Guide , keeping in mind that some elements will require Windows tools like Windows Firewall vs. Configure user rights to be as secure as possible: Follow the Principle of Least Privilege.

Provide secure storage for Confidential category-I Data as required. Security can be provided by means such as, but not limited to, encryption, access controls, filesystem audits, physically securing the storage media, or any combination thereof as deemed appropriate.

Configure a screen-saver to lock the console’s screen automatically if the host is left unattended. There are several methods available to assist you in applying patches in a timely fashion: Microsoft Update Service Microsoft Update checks your machine to identify missing patches and allows you to download and install them.

This is different than the “Windows Update” that is the default on Windows. This service is compatible with Internet Explorer only. Configure Automatic Updates from the Automatic Updates control panel On most servers, you should choose either “Download updates for me, but let me choose when to install them,” or “Notify me but don’t automatically download or install them. Configuring the password complexity setting is important only if another method of ensuring compliance with university password standards is not in place.

The Information Resources Use and Security Policy requires that passwords contain letters, numbers, and special characters. Instead of the CIS recommended values, the account lockout policy should be configured as follows: Account lockout duration — 5 minutes Account lockout threshold — 5 failed attempts Reset account lockout counter — 5 minutes.

It is highly recommended that logs are shipped from any Confidential cdevices to a service like Splunk , which provides log aggregation, processing, and real-time monitoring of events among many other things. This helps to ensure that logs are preserved and unaltered in the event of a compromise, in addition to allowing proactive log analysis of multiple devices. Configure user rights to be as secure as possible, following the recommendations in section 2. Ensure scheduled tasks are run with a dedicated Service account and not a Domain Administrator account.

Author Linda has been working as an editor at MiniTool for 1 year. As a fresh man in IT field, she is curious about computer knowledge and learns it crazily. Maybe due to this point, her articles are simple and easy to understand. Even people who do not understand computer can gain something.

By the way, her special focuses are data recovery, partition management, disk clone, and OS migration. Partition Wizard. Giving you full control over all aspects of your server infrastructure, Windows Admin Center is particularly useful for managing servers on private networks that are not connected to the Internet.

Get started with Windows Admin Center. Windows Server Get started for free. Supporting products. Get started for free Get started for free. Choose an edition and an installation option: Customers who download the full ISO will need to choose an edition and an installation option. Installation Options: Server Core: This is the recommended installation option. Hi Mike, thanks for putting so much effort into this guide. One question tho: How does the licencing work? Do we have to buy a bunch of [expensive] CALs for Server , or can we use the 25 users included in Essentials?

Giving me a hint on this matter would be great. Greetings from Germany, Jonathan. It took a crazy amount of work to figure all of this out and write it up, etc.

For more information see the fourth and fifth paragraphs in:. Working now for 3 months with this Server with essentials role installed and I absoutely love it. Thanks for all the work you did on this and would recommend for all home users coming from server Thanks for taking the time to post back and let us all know.

I have tried this a few times with fresh, updated installs and keep getting this error, any ideas of what I am doing wrong? Mine was working perfectly thanks to this guide, although now for some reason it is broken? Has this happened to anybody else possibly a windows update? Also the email service is broken. Is there a way someone could make a video and post it on how to do this?

Perhaps someone else will step up and produce one for the community. Use performance counters to diagnose app performance problems on Remote Desktop Session Hosts. Server Standard: I start with a virtual machine and install Server Standard, I do not activate.

I have a license but want to make sure I can successfully install this first. I then install all available updates. Once fully updated, I locate the all folders and copy them.

I then export all the registry keys. Server Standard: I install Server Standard on a virtual machine again do not activate. Then I proceed with installing the rolls in Step 2. I then copy back all the folders in Step 3 and 4. Now, in Step 5, I just double click on the registry keys to install. I proceed with Step 8 with the following;. Your help is very much appreciated. The Microsoft links are extremely confusion.

First off, you do not need to activate your Windows Server source install, nor your Windows Server destination install for any of this to work. It is quite involved seeing as a lot of work was put in in order to get it to successfully use the Essentials configuration wizard , and so it is not something that I plan on attempting to walk folks through building here as doing so would take pages and pages of explanation, etc.

Thank you for your quick reply. I decided to try something different. After a restart, the WSEE was installed successfully!! If so, which wizard do I run since there are several wizards in that folder. Again, thank you for all your help!!

I still have absolutely no idea why the cmdlet is giving you that error about the -Setting parameter no being found when you attempt to use it as stated in my list of steps. I had to jump through all kinds of hoops in order to get it to work properly via our WSEE Installer package. Believe me, if it was easy, then I would of instructed folks to use the wizard instead of the PowerShell cmdlet.

It is great and still working but I have an alert that says my firewall is not configured correctly and I think it was after installing remote acess. Do you have any thoughts on what may be the problem? Thanks in advance. Thanks for this nice tutorial! As I have a licence for Server Essentials lying around, I guess I could also install it as a virtual machine on my Server , right?

Heck, you could even go a step further and set up a second copy of Windows Server Datacenter as a Virtual Machine as well, and then install WSEE on it by following the list of manual install steps given above. Thank you! Teach me for not spotting that Essentials had been removed.

Remote Access complains, but works…. Will have to wait and see what happens with the client backups…. Is there anyway you could do a step by step video and host it on Youtube. Maybe someone else will step up and make one for you guys who are requesting it. As I mentioned above, the installer was written strictly for our own internal use and was never intended to be distributed to the general public.

The instructions were not completely clear to me. At step 3 you say copy the 7 folder from:to my question is copy them from the server installation but to where? Same for step 4, copy them to where? Last question, am I using a windows server standard or windows server essential as my source. After you cancel out of the wizard, go ahead and run Windows Update over and over until the server is fully up-to-date. Go ahead and run Windows Update over and over until the server is fully up-to-date.

Maybe you can solve this for me. Let me know if I can send them to you. No offense taken, All of the steps taken were easy and error free for me up to step 6, when I typed this code in that you had posted it gave me errors.

All of them for from step 6. I figured maybe I typed something wrong, so I saved the webpage as a pdf, which then allowed me to simply copy the code and paste them one by one and still the outcome was the same. This happens to be the first time for me installing a service from this approach, so it took me a moment to follow you instructions.

Thank you. So, what might I be doing wrong with your code? The only suggestions that I can offer you there is:. Make sure that all of the quotes surrounding the values are standard straight quotes and not those fancy curly quotes.

Otherwise, the command line will most certainly fail seeing as it requires elevated privileges in order to be successfully run. My apologies for that. However, you do have a nice suggestion to print i.

Thanks for sharing that tip. I copied exactly what you had listed and pasted it in an elevated command prompt. Can you show me exactly what response I should see after running anyone of these commands. How to create a Windows service by using Sc. As far as I remember, the tool just silently returns back to the command prompt on success.

Otherwise, it will list an error on failure. Or, you can open an elevated PowerShell prompt and type:. Which indicates that the list of dependencies should be separated by a forward slash just as I have them in in step 6. However, the documentation I linked you to states that the dependencies should be surrounded by quotes and separated by spaces. For example:. Thank you so very much.

EDIT M. It allows you to preserve file permissions etc. What I ended up doing was mounting the C drive of the server with WSEE installed and then copying the files over one by one. After numerous attempts at trying to fix file permissions, I eventually gave up and started with a fresh install. After copying the files as suggested above, it worked perfectly. Oh and also I forgot to mention.

I just left out the -Setting parameter. That just sets how Windows update should work. It runs fine without that parameter and you could always manually configure Windows updates afterward. Any chance you can provide a password so I can download the MSI file that you guys built?

I really appreciate any assistance you can give. Hi, is it possible to purchase the installer for WSEE on Server without purchasing one of your products please? A quick question, do you recommend that after the initial installation of Server that I should install WSEE before I join to the domain and install other roles or features? Or can I do it at any point? If you want to join your server to an existing domain i.

Thanks Mike. Then install WSEE. Does that sound like a plan? However, I do understand that some folks prefer to run Essentials as a member server, rather than having it be the primary DC. See this comment and this comment posted above. Which is also mentioned in the this comment as well.

None of your posts have been deleted. How long should the MSI installer take? Just want to make sure everything turns out the way it should. In most cases unless you have a really slow server , I assume that it should indeed take less that 10 minutes to complete adding the required roles and features. Other than that, you could try manually installing the five prerequisite server roles and features as shown in step 2 of the manual installation steps if you continue running into issues here.

Manually installing the prerequisite server roles and features one-by-one via an elevated PowerShell prompt would also let you see if an error is popping up when they are getting installed. There is a script that someone created to check Essentials installation which admitedly does only support up to but that returned no errors either.

Any ideas? Many thanks Jon. Hi Mike, An update to my message…. Thanks Jon. Otherwise, you can look at the following web pages for information on how to use a redirect in order to go back to the old behavior:. Remote Web Access login page Redirect. Remote Web Access does not redirect as expected. Hi, this is intriguing. I am moving from a Essentials and would ike to use I have a clean server up nd running. One question how well does this hold up to regular windows updates?

Any concerns there? Thanks for your reply, although to clarify you only mention standard or datacenter for your installer, does this work on the essentials version new install.

As a result, you cannot i. I have absolutely no idea what those things are. When you setup a standard Windows server, and add essentials to it, do you still need to make this the primary DC? Curious if I eliminate my current Essentials server then implement this version, if I can make my secondary DC the primary and leave it that way. When you install WSEE on Windows Server Standard or Datacenter, you can indeed configure it as a member server where it is not the primary domain controller, but rather joined to another existing domain controller on your network.

Do you have any thoughts on how to migrate from Essentials to and retain the same IP and name? I am even thinking of using the same server. All my stuff is on an array on an E: and F: drive so was thinking of replacing the primary drives with new ones of the same kind and rebuilding following your guidance. I would just like to be able to tie it back to my existing backups and not have to have all our workstations have to rejoin the domain.

Personally, I feel that unless you have some really pressing need to utilize features that are specific to Windows Server , that you should simply stick with using Windows Server Essentials instead.

It kept the name and IP, etc. Thanks for the heads up on the tiered storage issue. Great, thanks again for your support and for making my Server Essentials running as a proper Essentials version for 8 months now without any issues. Most appreciated. While I personally would of liked for it to have been a free benefit for the Essentials community especially since it is most likely based off of the work done here , I do understand that it takes time and effort to produce such content as well as the costs involved to host it, etc.

Because of this, I am unable to vouch for the accuracy of its contents, but I will go ahead and leave the link to it here for those who still wish to view it.

So if I did decide to trash my Essentials server and create a fresh install, how would I do that without loosing my domain? If I then build a server and add the essentials role would I need to switch it back to be the master or would that automatically happen? Would all the computers still be on the domain or have to be added again? That being said, there are others who have successfully done domain migrations from earlier versions of Essentials over to Windows Server with WSEE installed.

In fact, see the comment right below this one for a link to a nice Microsoft article that walks you step-by-step through the entire domain migration process including transferring all of the FSMO roles over to the new based domain controller, etc.

And yes, according to that document, you will indeed need to uninstall the Windows Server Essentials Connector software from all of your existing client PCs, and then install the newer version of it from See the Microsoft-provided documentation for further details. The WSEE installer worked great for me! However, I had a glitch to overcome as a result of my specific transition scenario, so wanted to do a quick post here to point out the problem and workaround for others.

While Microsoft provides a process for doing similar migrations see Step 2: Install Windows Server Essentials as a new replica domain controller , an additional step is needed if the source server in my case, the Win R2 Server was itself the destination of an earlier migration from an older server in my case, SBS The configuration wizard successfully ran through the pre-requisites verification step and correctly identified the server as a domain controller.

However, after it started the actual configuration process it stopped with the message:. If this issue still exists please refer to the help link for more troubleshooting steps.

This time, the Configuration Wizard ran to successful completion. Thanks again for sharing your experience with everyone, and you are most welcome for the WSEE Installer. After i downloaded now the german version from your wsee.

To marry a client with the wsee is no Problem, but after i set up wich drives to backup i tryed to run the first backup. But no suckses, every time the Clientbackup service is crashing. But always at a different Time in the Backup. I have no Idea what i could do that the one service is not crashing anymore.

On the same machine at a second harddisk is my primary w with manual installed wsee in english and work without any problem. Please try looking in the following location on BOTH the client computer AND on the server itself to see if there are any log files that give you an idea as to why your client backups are failing:. Just sort the log files within the folder by their modification date, and then look at the newly modified log files to see if you can find any information within them related to the client computer backup service crashing i.

Some news, client backup now is working. The Problem was some corruptet file in the clientbackup folder on the server and every time it was trying to acces that file the service on the server was crashing.

Delted the folder and recreate it in the wsee dashboard than it was working. But i now have a other Problem, after the backup was working i want to chance my second client to the new server. Every thing is fine expect, the second client shows allways offline. Have now add in lights out for the server the lights out bulp in tray on client shows server online.

Tryed to uninstall kaspersky on client but that changed nothing. But befor uninstall every essentials app have all pewrmissions. And that client was working with the english server essentials without problems too with kaspersky installed. Could you please give me again some hind where to search. The last hind with logs was good that was showing me the read error.

But now i have no logs because after the marriage from client with server the client is allways offline so i cant set up even the backup. Glad to hear that client backup is working for you now. Thus, about the best I can tell you here is to check out the log files on both the client and server; and in the same location that I mentioned to you in my prior comment to see if you can find any indication as to why the connection is failing. Other than that, have you tried completely uninstalling the connector software from your client computer, and then reinstalling it again?

Is the client computer properly joined to your Essentials domain? However, in order to successfully use the script on Windows Server with WSEE , you will need to edit it by opening the script in a text reader such as Notepad, etc. Hi Mike, Thanks very much for this.

When I load server manager it tells me that configuration is required for the Active Directory Certificate Services. I have tried a few times and get stuck at that place all the time. Did you happen to run into any issues with any of the earlier steps? Finally figured it out, spaces were needed where none were and some were where none were needed lol.

I have yet to test remote connection using the connector but other then that it now works fine. I have to admit that what you did requires a lot of work Believe me, I know having been a network analyst for more than 30 years so congrats are in order, this is awesome!!!!!!!

I had to delete the virtual storage pool on my server since windows said it belonged to a different domain. It seemed to be working great — thanks! PS — I turned it off and then on again, but no difference.

Okay, realized that my storage space was just My inability to create a client PC may be related to the tiny pool it initially created, which was only 10GB. So I deleted the pool in Server Manager, got the 4 drives I have in the Primordial pool of available disks and went to the Essentials Dashboard. When I try to create the storage space in the Dashboard, it says to select drives to create the storage space, but none are shown.

Maybe others with experience in this area will jump in and provide you with some further assistance. After the successful reinstall of the connector software, make sure that its tray icon is green and shows that the client is properly connected up to the Essentials server and not grey or red, which indicates a connection problem.

Lastly, please be aware that if your client computer is running Windows 10 , then there are LOTS of reports of issues with getting the client computer successfully connected up to the Essentials server appearing over on the Essentials boards. Storage Space comment: Yep, read that comment.

Yeah, I checked and the selected drives are online, and I can put files over to the two test drives with no problems. However it does NOT wipe out the other drives, which contain my old storage space. Good suggestion about looking in the essentials board — thanks for the link and the suggestion to stay out of trouble!

There were no errors, and the storage space was recognized just fine by the server Dashboard. Once everything is working properly i. Windows 10 version is a complete and utter mess IMHO. Apparently when Windows 10 gets updated to version , it wreaks havoc on the installed Windows Server Essentials Connector software i. Optional After the above program has been successfully uninstalled from the client computer, manually delete the following folders from the client computer if they happen to still exist:.

Optional Delete the following registry key branches using Regedit. Connect computers to a Windows Server Essentials server without joining the domain. Get Connected in Windows Server Essentials. I actually run into this issue quite a bit with W10 bi-yearly updates screwing up the WSE connector on W10 computers joined to a domain. It creates a registry entry that makes it so that when you reinstall WSE connector on domain joined computer, it will skip the domain join step and just install the connector software.

I found this information here Connect computers to a Windows Server Essentials server without joining the domain. Yes as mentioned above , the SkipDomainJoin connection method is well documented by Microsoft over on their website:. Hi, Thanks for this. We upgraded from server Essentials to server standard before realising essentials was no longer included.

I was planning on upgrading to a newer Windows server OS soon. I would like to still use the Essentials server roll option that Microsoft removed after server Yes, the client backup feature in all versions of Windows Server Essentials i. They just want client backup feature available for use.

Yes the client backup feature does indeed work under the Essentials SKU. Thus, you might as well give them a platform that is fully supported by Microsoft.

I hate that Microsoft abandon Server Essentinal with this great feature. I tried a test installation in a VM. Everything is working except third party plug-ins. There is no error during installation. Do I have to copy some other Files or modify anything else? Very strange. Glad to hear that you got the add-ins working in a different VM though. Not a single file is modified nor altered in any way.

Third party add-ins are indeed fully supported i. Your best bet there would be to contact the manufacturer of the add-in directly and ask them about it. I got it running following your instructions above, but am continuing to see a problem which also existed in Essentials where the storage service gets confused and declares a folder offline even though the underlying disk still exists. The generally accepted workaround according to Missing server folder alert, but folder is still present!

Is it possible that registration of the event sources got missed in your instructions above? Thanks for figuring it out! As is mentioned at the top of the manual install steps shown above, the steps only represent the bare minimum that is required in order to get Windows Server Essentials Experience installed, and working, on Windows Server If someone is looking for a straight forward easy, complete, and proper install, then we suggest using the WSEE Installer package instead.

I have a couple of quick questions. My original WSEE server was demoted and removed from the domain, blanked, reinstalled fresh as , re-joined to the domain, and started at your steps from there. Does the WSEE config process in fact promote the member server to a domain controller? If not, can the member server be promoted to a domain controller AFTER the config process has completed successfully?

If you want to keep the domain name and server name from your old Essentials server, just be sure that the old server is offline, and then use the exact same domain name and server name when configuring your new Windows Server with WSEE installation i. Unless you have lots of users, and have heavily modified your Active Directory, Group Policy, etc. Whereas, on a normal installation of WSEE, the server will automatically get configured as a primary domain controller for you as part of the Essentials configuration process.

I myself have never tried installing WSEE on a server that was already configured as a domain controller. The key for me was understanding whether or not WSEE configuration was attempting to promote the member server to a domain controller during the process. It was the first server in the environment, created the new domain etc.

Thank you Mike!! Promoted that server to a secondary domain controller for the DOM domain 3. I checked the box and clicked OK, but then the installer disappeared and nothing seemingly happened. I looked around for any running processes none and checked the new Server Essentials deployment Event Log that the MSI created in my Event Viewer but nothing no events.

Windows server 2016 standard installation and configuration free

 
Review Windows Server release notes and system requirements. Register, then download and install. Windows Server evaluation editions expire in Setup of Windows Server NIC Teaming (LBFO). Specify a drive that has free space of “installed memory size + MB” or more.

Windows server 2016 standard installation and configuration free

 
 
What is Windows Server ? Microsoft Windows Server is Microsoft’s server operating system (OS). It was specifically developed to serve as a platform for running networked applications. Windows Server was released for general availability on Oct. 12, , and was developed concurrently with Windows Windows Server is the eighth release of the Windows Server server operating system developed by Microsoft as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems. It was developed concurrently with Windows 10 and is the successor to the Windows based Windows Server first early preview version (Technical Preview) became available on October 1, . Chapter 2 – Windows Server Overview Installing Windows Server We are ready to install Windows Server on our VM. First we need to mount (or attach) the ISO we downloaded earlier to our VM and then we can launch the VM and begin the installation. Right click on the VM and choose settings. Select the Storage tab and select the “Empty”.

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