Configure SBS 2008 CITW to work without Internet connectivity

Thursday, 29 May 2008 12:14 by Beatrice

SBS 2008: How to work around not having Internet connectivity/no router in a virtual or isolated environment

One thing to note is that when you install SBS 2008 into a virtual environment, it will look for an internet connection. If you don't have the setup as recomended in the installation documentation, (meaning that you are not shutting off DHCP on your router) your network will not be fully configured as intended by SBS. Without going into too much detail on that part right now, let me just walk you through on how to easily set up the SBS 2008 box without needing actual internet connectivity.

Having said that, let me advise you that you want SBS to be the DHCP server, despite having the ability to shut off DHCP. If you disable DHCP on the SBS, you will open up a whole can of worms and defeat the purpose of SBS - making the setup of a small business network easy!

First you will launch the Connect to the Internet Wizard

The CITW will go out for network discovery - it will send out an ICMP message to 224.0.0.2 (multicast router discovery), an SSDP discovery message and ARP requests for 192.168.*.1 through 192.168.*.254. (so if you do have a router that you want it to configure, make sure to have set it to 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1)

Now that the CITW cannot find your router, you are asked to enter the information manually - note that SBS 2008 prefers to use 192.168.1.2 for itself, leaving the default 192.168.*.1 to the router. (btw. we only use a single NIC in SBS 2008)

The discovery comes back and says:

At this point you click YES and SBS decides that it did detect a router after all!

Here is the important part - You must select TEST in order to get the work-around option!

The test will come back telling you that a router really doesn't exist on the network, but you now have the option to select SKIP test (which you must select in order for the wizard to finish configuring your internal network)

And voila you have SBS thinking that everything is ok. Please realize that some of the other wizards will still not run properly as they require Internet access as well (Internet Address Managment Wizard) but at least you will have your isolated network set up to with SBS being the DHCP server, you will have internal email and can start joining clients to the domain and do all the other fun stuff.