Installed Windows Server 2022 on my desktop PC today. There was a reason I normally don't do this and it really showed once again.
Technically the drivers from Windows 10 should work, practically though its a mess. Its funny because the core OS can be identical like with Windows 10 Multi-User but the moment you use a seever OS the whole driver stack acts differently. Installers just don't like recognizing it as a proper OS if you do not have server hardware.
Normally when I install Windows my networking just works. My onboard Intel 211 adapter is detected, so is my USB ethernet. I had that one as a tempoary one when my onboard lan disnt work and these days I only use its USB hub as it also expands my USB ports. In cases like this its very handy since it allowed me back online. But it was a first sign this was not going to be a normal install.
I tried installing the AMD chipset driver. Flatout refuses to install saying my system is not compatible. Diagnosing that with an extremely stretched screen (4:3 stretched to 21:9) isn't fun so I tried Nvidia next. Nvidia's driver worked instantly so thats no surprise. I used to have a datacenter card in my system so I use their studio driver which works on every nvidia machine and is also sometimes used in servers. What didn't work was Nvidia's App. Long live the old control panel. Set uo my monitors there and deleted the app.
Up next, chipset again. This time I downloaded the latest one maybe mine was to old. No luck. Used my usual one but let device manager install them manually. That worked one by one.
Had a small serial adapter that also immediately worked.
The USB adapter provides great internet connectivity but I do want wake on lan. So I still had to fix the internet adapter. Completely unsupported. Not a single driver worked. Couldn't install it manually either. But I found a modified driver that was supposed to work on server 2019 for my card. Tried installing it manually but my 211 wasn't jn the list. Attempted 210 hoping it was close enough. It was. Card worked, but no proset driver that enabled the wake on lan. Annoying but we'll move on for now.
Xbox 360 controllers? First of all I like remote gaming so I need vigem to work. The author was apparently salty corporations use his driver and blocked the server products for no reason making the install fail. Found and tried the version from a time where he didn't do that. That worked. Back to the Xbox 360 controller. How do you get that working? The old installer for Windows XP apparently. Its 2009 64-bit version works great and made the controller work.
Now all I had left was wake on lan. I found a driver that still bundled the proset tools but my earlier failed attempt to install proset blocked it. So I removed the working driver and tried installing it again. Not compatible with my network card. Installed the modified driver back and tried again hoping to only get a working proset. This worked well, finally a complete system.
Turns out that my usual ways of shutting down no longer worked. StartAllBack and the shutdown command both didn't shut the PC down, it would only log the account off. One very obscure setting later that was now fixed.
Moral of the story, just enjoy Windows Server in a VM lab if you dont have good hardware for it or a really good reason.
So why did I put the effort in? The main KoboldCpp dev had his laptop break and I wanted him to be able to develop on Windows with something more powerful than his 6GB of vram emergency laptop. But I want to use my PC as a Windows PC while he does things. Windows 10/11 have Hyper-V but only allow a virtualized GPU passtrough. On WSL that works well for cuda with a specialized driver, but on a Windows VM it will do some basic DirectX at best. With this windows server setup my AI machine's VM can have dedicated access to my secondary GPU with all features. And now for the time being he can use my PC without compromising my own security.
And thus a fun friday in my #sysadmin #homelab life.