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After making any changes or accepting the defaults, Setup will continue to Personalize the Software screen, where you would enter your personal information as you would like it to appear on subsequent software installs. (This is the information that automatically populates in the name and organization fields of all the software installed on the system from this point forward.)
After this point you are directed to choose a licensing mode. All of the Windows Server 2003 brands support either the Per Server option, where each connection to the server must have its own license, or the Per Device or Per User licensing option, where each person or device must have a client access license.
When you choose Per Device or Per User licensing, each device or user that needs to access a server running Windows Server 2003 requires a separate Client Access License (CAL). With client-side licensing, clients can connect to any number of servers running products in the Windows Server 2003 family or down-level Windows Operating systems. Client-side licensing is the most commonly used licensing method for enterprises with many servers.
Per Server licensing means that each concurrent connection to the server requires a separate CAL. Thus, the server can support a fixed number of connections at any one time. Whether the clients have a license does not come into play. The server will only be allowed to “serve” the number of concurrent connections to it allowed under its Per Server licensing configuration. (Think of this along the lines of, “It doesn’t matter how many people in the lobby want to pay to see the movie, there are only so many seats.”)
Per Server licensing mode is often preferred by small companies with only one or two servers.
You can perform a one-time change from Per Server mode to Per Seat mode at any given time after installation, but this is a one-shot, one-way-only operation for the most part. Once performed, there is no practical way to reverse it, short of re-installing the operating system or paying a transfer fee of some sort. (I keep seeing that as a reference, paying to perform the function of converting from Per Seat back to Per Server, but I haven’t read much about what’s involved. Documentation on this seems nonexistent.)
After you have made your licensing choice and continued, the next window that will prompt you for information will be the Computer Name and Administrator Password screen. Here, you will choose the name of the system. (Setup will autogenerate a name and you can use that if you wish.)
Computer names should be 15 characters or less, and they can contain letters (A through Z), numbers (0 through 9), and hyphens (-), but no spaces or periods (.). While the names can contain numbers, they cannot consist entirely of numbers.
The maximum allowable length for a computer name is 63 characters. While names longer than 15 characters are permitted, computers running operating systems earlier than Windows 2000 will recognize systems only by the first 15 characters of the name. This may cause certain network naming and resolution issues.
This is the same screen in which you will need to enter the password to be used with the default Administrator account.
For security reasons you should supply a password for the Administrator account. If you are allowed to leave the Administrator password blank and continue, this tells the system the account has no password — a very insecure way to operate in any environment.
Passwords can have up to 127 characters, but this ones that long are impractical and cumbersome to remember. It is recommended that passwords have at least 7 characters, and they should contain a mixture of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and other allowed special characters such as, * ? : ; @ or $.
After entering the password and verifying it, you would select NEXT to continue and arrive to the screen where you can set the date, time, and time zone settings. This is also where you would specify whether the system should automatically adjust for daylight saving time or not.
The next screen up is the Specifying Networking Settings where you can allow the Typical Settings to be applied. This is also where settings are customized. (You are always free to customize the network settings after the operating system is loaded and under normal operation.)
There are a few changes to the Network Protocol additional settings options in the Windows Server 2003 family, most noticeable is the addition of the Reliable Multicast Protocol as well as support for Microsoft TCP/IP version 6.
The next step of the installation process after Specifying Networking Settings is the Specifying the Workgroup or Domain Name screen. Your Windows Server 2003 build can function either as a stand-alone server in a workgroup or as a member server in a domain.
To add the server to an existing domain you must supply the necessary credentials at this time if an account for the server has not already been created.
If you choose to add the server to a workgroup you need only to supply the name of the workgroup.
This is the final interactive step. The Setup program will continue for a few more minutes on its own. Once complete, the setup program will reboot the server, and it will await user input at the logon screen on restart.
The Configure Your Server Wizard appears on the screen the first time you log on locally to the server with the administrator account.
You can enable the Configure Your Server Wizard to finish installing optional components that you chose during setup or add additional components as well. There are options to configure domain controllers or member servers, file servers, print servers, Web and media servers, application servers, and networking and communications servers, throughout this wizard.
