I recently read a bit of good news. Windows Server 8 is going headless, no that does not mean that it is going to menace a small New England township or try to emulate Christopher Walken (who quite frankly is the coolest actor this side of Gary Oldman, but I digress). What this means my GUI addicted system administrator friends is that it is going command line only.
The following blog from Microsoft outlines the future :
http://blogs.technet.com/b/server-cloud/archive/2012/01/11/windows-server-8-server-applications-and-the-minimal-server-interface.aspx
There will be training wheels with the minimal server interface, but by and large, probably by Windows Server 8.5 or so, it is going to be command line all the way. And quite frankly this is a good thing.
Ah that brings back pleasant memories of telneting to a Solaris host back in the late nineties early noughties, well that was before SSH became vogue and we were on our own internal network anyway so there. The beauty of the command line is you have to know what you are doing and what you want to achieve, none of this guessing where that option is via the oh so helpful MMC snap in. I am sure a lot of people are going to get intimate with Get-Help. Ten points to the tech in the back who even knows what that is from.
Get-Help is a Powershell command. It allows you to find out how to use a given command, the syntax and even examples, for the real geeks out there “oh look Microsoft does the man command”. So how to prepare and survive this brave new world? Learn Powershell for one, look for cool command line utilities and learn those. I have not shared my love for nltest or robocopy yet, but that is for a future tool post or two. Get used to using the command line options, if you manage Exchange servers try to use the Exchange Management Shell (EMS) more. Helpfully the Exchange Management Console (EMC) is built to call the underlying Powershell cmdlets written for Exchange and will also handily show you the syntax for the command you created with the GUI. Another option is to install Server 2008 Core into a virtual machine and connect to it and manage it, no it will not have all the nice cmdlets that Microsoft is I am sure building for Windows Server 8 but at the very least you get used to the way things are going to be.
The upside of this is if you are ever thrust into the cold unforgiving world of UNIX and/or Linux you are well used to interacting with the command line. Most if not all pro *NIX installations are going to be headless so it is good to have transferable skills. It would also be worth installing a virtualised instance of Ubuntu server (which comes headless as standard) just to get used to this world as well. Nothing says job security like transferable skills.
Quite frankly I am looking forward to this, the reasons given is that the server is more secure with no GUI or Internet Browser installed. Less attack surface as they say for hackers to use as a vector. And anyway as most good sys admins that have been around a while know “real men use the command line”
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