The Life of Brian
Active Directory, Security, PowerShell and My Life
Apr
04
How to Join a Server Running Server Core to a Domain
You”ve installed Server Core and think it”s time to join that new server to your domain. Since you can”t right click on My Computer any more you”ll have to learn how to do it the Server Core way.
From the command prompt type the following with:
netdom join ComputerName /domain:DomainName /userd:UserName /passwordd:*
A couple things to note here:
- Depending on how you have configured your DNS settings you may have to put the FQDN in for the DomainName
- Yes, /passwordd:* needs to have that second d at the end of it.
May 13th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
stupid double-d”s 😉
November 10th, 2008 at 6:56 am
This is a useless article. The trick to joining a server core machine to a domain is enabling network access. See, for example, http://www.evanclosson.com/devlog/homedevelopmentenvironment
November 10th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Useless??? Wow those are strong words David since your article that you linked to doesn”t even talk about the same thing. You state that in your environment you are using a workgroup…well that has nothing to do with this article of joining a server to a DOMAIN.
Next time before commenting on a blog make sure you understand if your comment or link is relavent to what your commenting about. More than likely you were just trying to get some traffic to your site by posting that link here. I”ll keep it up for now.
November 17th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Short and sweet. We have issues trying to join Server 2008 systems (not Core) to the domain through the Control Panel mainly because of an aging domain controller and that the systems are a sub-domain. This command worked wonderfully.
November 25th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
I have no idea who posted that. But it did drive a bunch of traffic to me. It caused an unusual spike, that”s why I”m here 🙂
And you are right it is not the same thing. Keep up the posting, the more tidbits of information out there the better.
Evan
November 25th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Thanks Evan. Glad to have brought a bit a traffic over to you too!!!
January 22nd, 2009 at 7:41 pm
Hey Brian, how do I set the DNS for the Core so it can communicate with the domain?
January 24th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Hi Bill. Do you mean how do you configure the NIC for a DNS server? If so that is talked about here – http://msmvps.com/blogs/ad/archive/2008/09/18/admin-s-guide-to-server-core-commands.aspx
If you want to know how to manage DNS from Server Core you can find the commands here – http://msmvps.com/blogs/ad/archive/2008/03/28/dnscmd-reference.aspx
Brian
February 23rd, 2009 at 6:47 am
This is exactly the right command. Whoever said it”s useless should not be allowed near a computer. Thank you so much!
February 23rd, 2009 at 9:35 pm
Thank you so much! the MS server core documentation left off the second “d”, and had me banging my head against the wall. I suspect someone proof reading the whitepaper is to thank . . . .
June 14th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
I am playing with Server Core and wanted to join it to my test domain.
Thanks for this command, it worked like a charm 🙂
July 22nd, 2011 at 11:16 pm
I’m doing a self-study towards MSCITP and was getting annoyed joining a Core to my test domain and not getting a prompt. Spoiled by Windows GUI I suppose! Thanks!