After getting your first Nano Server up-and-running, a logical next question to ask is What now?. With a traditional server you would set things such as the hostname and IP address, and probably join it to your domain. More than likely, once your Nano Server is established you will be heading down into the final recipes of this chapter to figure out the best ways to remotely administer this new machine, but until you have networking and domain membership established, you aren't going to be able to do much with the remote management tools. So is there any kind of console access on a Nano Server? Yes, but it is very limited. The tool that is presented in the console is called the Nano Server Recovery Console, and the capabilities provided by this tool are the focus of our current recipe.
We are going to be working from the console of the new Nano Server we just finished building. This server is plugged into our corporate network, which is running an Active Directory domain. If you remember, when we ran the command to compile our VHD file that is used by NANO1 we were able to set the hostname right there, so we should see that NANO1 name reflected already in the configuration.
Let's explore the Nano Server Recovery Console together:
- Powering up your new Nano Server brings us to the login screen shown at the end of our previous recipe. Go ahead and login with the local administrator credentials that you specified during the VHD creation process.
- Now, inside the recovery console we can see that the hostname of our NANO1 was set properly during the VHD creation. That is good news! And it appears we have just a few options available for us to choose from.
- We want to set an IP address on the system, so go ahead and choose the Networking option.
- Select the NIC that you want to configure—my system only has one—and press Enter.
- As indicated at the bottom of the screen, you must now press F11 in order to configure IPv4 Settings on this network interface.
- I am currently configured for DHCP, but if I press the F4 key to Toggle, I am able to change to a static IP address and define my own.
- Press Enter twice to save these settings.
- Use the ESC key to get back to the main menus.
- This time let's take a look inside Inbound Firewall Rules.
- Looks like we have a good list of pre-defined firewall rules. By navigating into the properties of each of these rules, you will have the option to enable or disable the rule. Even though Nano Server is incredibly locked down right out of the gate, you can further deny the ability to contact this server via methods defined by the individual firewall rules.
- Other than viewing firewall rules, the only other option you have inside the Nano Server Recovery Console is WinRM. Head into that piece of the management tool, and you will see a description that tells you this option is simply to reset the status of WinRM on this server. Since almost all the configuration of Nano Server is intended to be remote, having the WinRM service running and being allowed to communicate with this server is essential to getting your job done. If you have made some firewall tweaks and suddenly you can no longer connect to it with your remote management tools, this section of the recovery console is a quick way to set the WinRM settings and firewall rules back to factory defaults.
The Nano Server Recovery Console is very limited, making these servers as close to headless as possible. However, there are certain things that you are just going to have to do from a console when starting up a new server, and so those bare minimums are the options presented here. Opening up the console of a Nano Server is going to be an extremely rare task, but it is one that you will most likely have to undertake just after building out a new Nano Server so that you can make those initial configurations.