Server Core is an option for installing Windows Server 2008.

"A Server Core installation provides a minimal environment for running specific server roles that reduces the maintenance and management requirements and the attack surface for those server roles." - Courtesy MS

After the installation of Server Core you are prompted to login. The only active account on the machine is the administrator account and the password is blank. You are prompted to change the password immediately after successfull authentication.

Installing services is done from the command line. Unfortunately, it is not the Power Shell command line like many had hoped. Instead it is the classic Windows command line but if you are an old Dos Junkie like myself, you won't have any problems with that. :-)

To change the computer name from the command prompt simply type the following:

netdom renamecomputer %computername% /NewName:
OR
wmic computersystem where name="%computername%" rename name="new_name"

To Join a Domain: (note: do this only after rebooting if you just changed the server's name)

netdom join %computername% /domain: /userd: /passwordd:*

Now you need to set the IP address, Subnet, Gateway and DNS of the machine. To do this use the following commands:

netsh interface ipv4 add address "Local Area Connection" IP_ADDRESS SUBNET gateway=GATEWAY_IP
netsh interface ipv4 add dnsserver "Local Area Connection" address=DNS_SERVER_IP index=1

Now to configure the machine to allow RDP access, you will want to use the commands below.

cscript %windir%\System32\ScRegEdit.wsf /ar 0
cscript %windir%\System32\ScRegEdit.wsf /cs 0

Activate Windows :

First, you have to set your product key, if you haven't already:

cscript %windir%\System32\slmgr.vbs -ipk YOUR-PRODUCT-KEY

Now you can activate:

cscript %windir%\System32\slmgr.vbs -ato

Configuration of the server can be done through the command line on the machine or through MMC snap-ins. If you want to remotely administer you must allow remote management throught the firewall.

netsh advfirewall set allprofiles settings remotemanagement enable

To install a service, you will use the ocsetup command. This command will install and uninstall individual services in Server Core. It will not install the dependencies of any services. This affects Print and IIS, so you have to install the features of these services in the correct order. Unfortunately, this will not change in the RTM of Server 2008. Microsoft is supposedly working on a solution to for the next release. I installed one service on my machine, WindowsBackupServer. To install it, I used the following command:

start /w ocsetup WindowsServerBackup

That was it, it ran for a while and the service was installed. To configure it, I needed to use wbadmin. I am not going to cover this command because it doesn't really fall into the scope of this post.