With the textmode setup complete, it’s time to do the graphical setup of Windows NT 4.0

Next

You can use any name/org

Select how many licenses you have for your NT Server.

Give the server a name

I’m not going to build a domain, so a stand alone server is fine.

You can give the Administrator account a password if you so desire.

I don’t need any emergency repair disk, as this server is the epitome of disposable.

I added all the components.  Again for this test it really doesn’t matter.

Now for the fun part, we are going to configure the networking.

I’m sticking to ‘wired’ networking.  I’ll save RAS for another lifetime.

Everyone wants to be a webserver.  Sure why not.

You can either manually select a NIC, or just let it auto-detect.  We are going to auto-detect it though.

And it’ll correctly identify the AMD PCNet card.

I selected all the protocols available.  I didn’t bother adding other ones like AppleTalk.

Next..

Next

It’ll prompt for the media type and duplex.  The card isn’t real and it’ll work fine no matter what.  I just leave the options alone.

Our network doesn’t have any DHCP server.  Since we are plugged into a simple hub.  DHCP requests will fail.  Let’s give it a static address.  For Advanced people, yes you could wireshark on the wire to observe the DHCP.  We will touch on how to do that later, as I just want to get NT installed .

There is no need for a gateway.

We don’t have any bindings that need adjusting, so you can just hit Next

And Next again

Again, no domain, so run in workgroup mode.

Finish, although it’s far from over.

IIS components to install.  I just hit OK for the defaults.

Confirm the creation of the directory

And the child directories

And creating the IIS child directories

Gopher isn’t happy without a domain name, but I don’t care.

Select your timezone.  Or don’t.  This is from 1996, so many of the timezones are no-longer correct.  Just as DST has changed so many times.  But it really doesn’t matter yet again.

The display adapter is SVGA compatible.

Move the resolution slider to 800×600

Then hit OK.  It’ll want to test the resolution

Everything looks good

YES I saw the bitmap

OK

OK to accept the display at 800×600

Files will finally start to copy

And now we can finally restart are computer.

By default the NT Loader will wait for 30 seconds.  You can hit enter to get it to load right away or wait.

But we have now completed installing Windows NT, so we can now move on to capturing some traffic, aka part 6..

In this post we are going to install Windows NT 4.0 Server into our VM.

The first step is to turn the VM on.  Simply right click on the VM, and choose Start. The red dot will then turn green.  Although it may appear that nothing is happening we just can’t see it yet.

Right click again, and choose the console, and VNC will then connect to the Qemu VM, and we can now interact with it.

And here is where we start installing Windows NT 4.0.  I’ll just put the keys in parenthesis of what I’m doing. In this case just hit:

(enter)

(enter)

(c)

(page down) until you get to the end, then hit (f8) to agree to the license

The default options are OK.  (enter)

(c)

(enter)

I chose NTFS for my server.  Although I’m not interested in creating a domain, so FAT will work too.  It really doesn’t matter.

(enter)

(enter)

(enter)

Waiting for the files to copy

(enter)

On reboot if you have selected NTFS it’ll convert the filesystem like this:

After the conversion, NT will reboot again, then it’ll continue the setup process.

Otherwise you’ll just reboot directly into the graphical setup of Windows NT, and we can continue in part 5.

In our previous post, we configured a Qemu template for Windows NT.

With the NT template ready we will be prompted to give this project a name.

So I called this one ‘what-is-a-vlan’ sticking with the theme.

Now we can drag components out.  I selected the NT template that I’ve created, and dragged it out to the design pane.  Now we have a computer!

I then selected a simple Ethernet hub, to begin verifying that our configuration is working.  Just drag it out to the toplogy pane.

Now for the fun part, we are going to connect the Windows NT VM to the Hub.  Right click on the Qemu VM, and it’s available Ethernet interfaces will pop up.  It only has one, so select Ethernet 0.

Now you can select the Hub to complete the connection.  Hubs repeat every packet they receive, and don’t change anything.  They offer zero intelligence, and have no way to save you from yourself, if you do anything stupid (see creating a loop).  Every packet that comes into a hub is sent to every port going out.  They don’t care about protocols, or anything they just simply repeat.

 

So this will be our simple network.  The next thing to do is to turn on our PC, and install Windows NT 4.0.  I’ll save that for the next step which you can follow here.  If you don’t care about installing Windows, then you can skip to the following step where we will do a simple packet capture of the NT machine connected to the hub so we can observe how it’s packets look.

In the last post, we quickly went over the default install of GNS3.

We are now going to configure a QEMU template for Windows NT.  I’m going with Windows NT as its pretty resource low, has TCP/IP and other protocols like IPX/SPX which can be routed and NetBEUI which has to be bridged.

We are going to use the Qemu option

Although we do get this warning, it really doesn’t matter.  NT runs fine.

Give the machine a name

The default 256MB of RAM is more than enough.

Set the console to VNC, as NT is graphical

I set it to use the included qemu-2.4.0’s Qcow2 image format for the virtual hard disk

The default options are fine.

I’m not going to try to build anything that sophisticated, so 500MB is more than enough for NT 4.0 .  If you do want something more involved 2GB is the effective limit for a boot disk for NT 4.0 SP1

The default name is fine too.

We do however need to make some changes.  The network card needs to be the AMD PCnet version, and we need to add an additional flag to Qemu to restrict the CPU functionality to a 486 so that NT will install without any issues.

So the networking tab will let you change the type.  AMD PCNet is the one that is supported out of the box, and verified working!

On the Advanced settings tab, is where you can add the -cpu 486 flag, as indicated above.

On the CD/DVD tab, you will want to point it to an ISO of Windows NT.  It doesn’t matter if it’s Workstation, Server, Enterprise, Terminal Server.  They all install the same.

It will prompt you if you want to copy the ISO into the default images directory.  It really doesn’t matter one way or the other.

Now the image is configured for NT.

Now we can continue to building our first topology (AKA Part 3).