Step 7:
This screen allows you to name your server and pick a password for the "local" administrator account. See Figure 1-5.

Figure 1-5

Choosing a name for your server should take a bit of thought. I realize this document is aimed at small businesses which may never have more than one server. However, an ounce of planning here is worth a pound of "Hey, is that sales report on the Minnie, Mickey, or Goofy server?" down the road when your company grows. I recommend creating a naming convention consisting of a four letter designation for your site, a two letter function designation, and a 2 digit number to distinguish each server, e.g. "MAINDC01" for the first Active Directory Domain Controller (DC) at the Main location. Tying the first four letters of your server name to your location will relieve many headaches down the road. This server will be a domain controller, so I've chosen "DC" as a two letter function designation. Lastly, I add two digits to specify which server it is. So someday if you have 2 DC's and 3 file servers at a main location and a west-side-of-town location, then your server names could be MAINDC01, MAINFS01, MAINFS02, WESTDC01, and WESTFS01. For the name of my server, I've chosen TESTDC01.

You will hear the terms "local account" and "domain account" many times throughout these articles. All modern versions of Windows keep what is called a local account database. The local account database (or SAM database) is specific to each workstation. The downside of this is that it creates a lot of work when you have more than a few workstations. For example, say you have 10 workstations and 10 people. You want each person to be able to log on to whatever computer they want. Without a domain, you have around 100 accounts and passwords to manage. What a hassle! When you configure a workstation to logon to a domain (by "joining" that computer to it), anyone with a domain account can logon to that machine. Much easier! So just configure all of your user accounts in the domain, join your workstations to the domain, and you are set. We will get to doing that in a later article in this series.

Phew, now that we have that necessary bit of explanation down, we get to choose our administrator password. It is important to choose a "strong" password for this account. It holds the keys to the kingdom, so to speak.

In Windows 2003, strong passwords consist of at least 6 characters and do not contain the words "Administrator" or "Admin." Additionally, they must be made up of three of the following: uppercase characters, lowercase characters, numbers, or non-alphanumeric characters. This may sound confusing, but I have a couple tricks that will help you make hard to crack but easy to remember passwords. One common technique is to substitude numbers for letters in a word. "Remember" would be "R3m3mb3r." That is a strong password because it is more than 6 characters, doesn't contain the forbidden words, and it has uppercase, lowercase, and numbers. Plus, it is easy to "remember!" You can also substitude non-alphanumeric characters for letters as well. $un$h!n3 might look like gibberish, but it is actually the word "Sunshine" with $'s for S's and !'s for i's. It is important to have strong passwords that are easy to remember. You can have a 20 digit randomly generated password, and it will do no good if you put it on a sticky note next to your monitor! One last technique that I like is taking a particularly memorable phrase and using the first letters of it. For example, "Stupid Is As Stupid Does" could become !@Siasd@!. I throw in the symbols at the beginning and end to strengthen the password.

If you don't put in a good enough password here, Windows will warn you with a message like Figure 1-6. So choose your own strong password and enter it here. Click "Next" to continue.

Figure 1-6

The next screen is an easy one! Simply choose your time zone, edit the time if necessary, and click "Next."