Russell Smith, the Editorial Director at Petri IT Knowledgebase, has over two decades of hands-on experience in IT, in both small business settings and government IT infrastructure projects. Russell started writing for Windows IT Pro Magazine in t...
Server Core is the default installation option in Windows Server 2012, but many will choose the full GUI because it’s easier to configure and manage. In this article, I’ll show you how to set basic configuration parameters in Server Core so that you can get it up and running quickly, and take advantage of the small footprint and reduced attack surface.
Once Server Core has installed, log on with the local administrator account and run the following command in the console: sconfig
The first task is to give the server a useful name. You can see in the figure above that a name has been automatically generated, but it doesn’t have any meaning on my network or help me to identify the server. To change the server’s name, do the following.
You’ll see a list of network adapters and corresponding index numbers. Choose the network adapter that you want to configure by typing its index number and pressing Enter. Usually the index number is 12, but this can vary.
Sconfig doesn’t allow us to join Server Core to a domain. To do that, start PowerShell from the command line console: