Building a server out of gaming parts is a doozy, come read my series of unfortunate events

[pogoemt]

Hi everyone, this is my first thread on the LTT forum, some of you may have seen this chronicle unfold in #my-rig in discord, but here goes.

 

A little background about me, I am a college student studying Cybersecurity and currently working as a Cybersecurity Engineer focusing in SOC Engineering, Consulting, and Incident Response. By default, I also do a lot of internal company network administration and I am looking to learn digital forensics. 

 

About 2 months ago my Z97 motherboard failed and in a rush to meet a tournament commitment I had the next day, I elected to go to Best Buy and purchase new parts. Turns out they don't carry Z97 motherboards anymore and I had to buy a Z370 motherboard and processor and new DDR4 RAM. Rebuilt my machine that evening with no major issues.

 

Fast forward to this past week, I decided that I wanted to build a lab machine to practice pen testing and considering none of my old parts from my previous build had sold, I figured I would scrounge some parts together. I went back to my parents house and took an old 2009 desktop to use for the case and cannibalize parts as needed. I disassembled the PC and waited for my new motherboard to arrive, come to find out that the mobo wouldn't fit the old case (go figure) and that I would need to buy a new case. Now I have a 2009 gateway PC with Windows Vista on board but half decent specs for the time period all things considered. I elect to wipe the machine and put hyper-v server on it. After installing hyper-v server I discover that the processor doesn't support virtualization, confirm this by attempting to put ESXi on the server, then give up and put AlienVault OSSIM on it because I have no clue what else to do with it.

 

Now for the actual server I wanted to build, put it together in maybe 30 minutes with no issues then the following events ensued:

• Network adapted not detected by Hyper-V server or ESXi, now I'm thinking that the adapter is broken
• Attempt to install drivers that came with the motherboard but they error out because they need a GUI dll that Hyper-V server doesn't have (commandline hypervisor, woohoo)
• Attempt ESXi but the install fails because they require an internet connection (really? you care about licensing that much? even microsoft lets you deploy unlicensed machines)
• Attempt to install Windows Server 2016 but the install fails because ESXi installer had already started to make partition changes
• Reparation 1TB drive from scratch on my normal PC
• Deploy Windows Server 2016 and network adapter still isn't detected
  • Driver disk isn't supported by this OS.jpg
• Find an obscure generic network interface driver that happens to work
• Run windows updates (10 years later)
• Install actual drivers

 

So I now have a Windows server 2016 on a host that I wanted to use for dedicated virtualization, so now I get to virtualize through the OS and enjoy the fun that is inefficient VM hosting

 

 

thank you for coming to my ted talk

 

 

[pogoemt]

I also had a fiasco with the linksys router trying to put dd-wrt on it and almost bricking the thing when I turned the DHCP server off but I don't feel like typing that whole thing out, just know I hate myself for not figuring it out sooner

[Fasauceome]

 

12 minutes ago, pogoemt said:

had to buy a Z370 motherboard and processor and new DDR4 RAM

Your board failed so you just dropped a load of cash on high end hardware? Wish I could just throw $800 bucks around like that, especially since I'm also a college student.

[pogoemt]

Just now, fasauceome said:

 

Your board failed so you just dropped a load of cash on high end hardware? Wish I could just throw $800 bucks around like that, especially since I'm also a college student.

Fortunately I made decent money as a security engineer and had been working overtime on weekends on some projects, I was also working a second job as an EMT at the time so between the two I had a good amount of expendable money. I guess it was as good as time as any for a hardware failure. 

[Granular]

Quote

Building a server out of gaming parts is a doozy

Just works (TM) on my machine.

Your main mistake was using Windows.

[pogoemt]

1 minute ago, Granular said:

Just works (TM) on my machine.

Your main mistake was using Windows.

Unfortunately I still like Windows because the licenses I have are provided through my school so not having to deal with their stupid licensing system is very appealing to use an otherwise decent OS.