Checklist of most stupid things I did:

Buy a 500gb SSD and install Windows Server 2008 R2 onto it, then configure it to look like Windows 7 and use it for development/gaming ✅

BTW after installing all features and components, it runs very well.

Second big school project. Designed for at least 2 people. Quite a lot of work for the given time but not impossible to do, as I thought. Oh boy was I wrong.

My partner and I chose a networking project which included setting up a ESXi-Server, a VM (with Windows Server 2008 R2) and a router. We are both not unknowledged so I thought this would be easy-going.
I quickly recognised that my partner liked to spend his time at home rather than actually doing something so I ended up doing nearly everything.
When it came to documenting everything he tried to write something, but it had so many mistakes i had to correct it over and over again.
I asked him multiple times, if we should split and he denied every time and promised to work harder.
End of that story was him being expelled from school because of to many missed lessons and me finishing the project alone. Got a B+ for it.

I fucking hate having to use Windows 2008 R2 Server.
We have a college project and the deadline is near. Fml. I did the ftp server, the ad dc, dns server, and when I am about to configure the dhcp server Windows fucking fucks everything up. Urrghhh...
I will never ever touch any windows server os in my life again. It is just a pain in the ass...

!rant from a support guy

I was tasked to migrate an Exchange 2003 server (yes, those are still used) for an upcoming Office 365 deployment. There are no direct upgrade path from one another, as far as we know

My task was to export PSTs from mailboxes. Great, a native tool exist for that in 2003 (exmerge). But only for less than 2 GB mailboxes because ANSI/Unicode! Half of our mailbox busts that limit. Oh, it seems Exchange 2007 has a PowerShell command for exporting to PST as well! But pre-SP3, that command relies on a local installation of Outlook on the server (DAFUQ), and has been superseded by another "standalone" powershell command. So I install a bogus Windows 2012 server only for that purpose, with Exchange Management Tools (which, by the way, is bundled with the Exchange installation setup and REQUIRES to have IIS installed on the target machine. Also, if you install ONLY the Exchange 2007 Management Tools and wish to uninstall them afterwards, you can't because the uninstaller wants me to select an Exchange Role to remove, which are all unchecked in my tools-only setup). Never worked, and Google-fu says that the newer Exchange 2007 New-MailboxExportRequest command seems to have removed Exchange 2003 support.

So i'm back to installing a pre-SP3 Exchange 2007. Then the older Export-Mailbox powershell command whines about 64bits and 32bit incompatiblity-- actually I ***HAVE*** to have the whole OS/software stack 32bit ONLY. Don't ask me why!

Some article I found says I could fire up an XP virtual machine for that, I go for Win 7 x86. "Sorry, Microsoft Exchange won't be installed on a workstation environment because reasons." All right then, let's go for an old Windows Server 2003 x86. Have you tried to boot this up in an Hyper-V environment where mouse and keyboard support for Windows Server 2003 are apparently optional? No keyboard AND mouse events sent to the guest machine at all.

* Sigh *, let's use a Windows Server 2008, but WATCH OUT! Microsoft has discontinued x86 support on their W2008 R2 release, so non-R2 for me. Even then, mouse event wasn't sent until I installed guest additions.

After all, export-mailbox ended up working, but that costed me two days of banging my head against the wall. (Oh, and I take internal calls inbetween as well...)

And that's why I aspire to be a programmer. Thank you for nothing, Microsoft!

So.. I'm migrating a physical server to a virtual (Hyper-V) one.

The physical server is running Windows Server 2008 R2 with IIS6 and Windows SQL Server 2012.

I've set up a VM with Windows Server 2016, IIS10 and Windows SQL Server 2017.

I'm testing with just moving 1 db at a time (we have about 20, 1 per client running this software and a few others) and I've already imported all of the IIS sites.

So the database import and IIS import went smoothly and was surprisingly without hassle but now I'm trying to run the website that I imported the database for and it is throwing 503 Errors at me.
I've been trying to find out the cause but for some reason IIS isn't making any logs.
It's not any 64/32bit system problems (they're both x64) and I can't seem to find anything wrong with the imported config.

Anyone got any ideas?