mnemosyn's questions

I fiddled around with the virtual network settings of my Hyper-V server, because Windows Update failed to run in the VMs. I set the flag that makes the NIC exclusively usable by the VM. Now, the host system tells me it has no active network adapters.

What does that even mean? According to netsh, there are three enabled network connections. I tried to restart the NICs using devcon.exe (the correct x64 version), but that doesn't make any difference - still, devcon reports the NICs are there and they are activated?!

Is there any way I can force the host (using the console) to re-enable the NICs?

After some struggle, I finally managed to set up Hyper-V 2008 R2 on our server. So I connected to it using the Hyper-V Manager from a Windows 7 client and used the "New Virtual Machine Wizard". I set up a 350GB virtual hard disk.

So I hit the "finish" button and the Hyper-V manager has been working for > 24hours now, showing merely a dialog "Creating Disk". A console on the Hyper-V still reports 99.9% free space on the HD, but the machines HD LED flashes from time to time (making a rather idle impression, it's not flashing frenetically).

Does this usually take this long? Is there a way to find out whether it's still working or just idling? Should I repeat the process? Guides on the net tell me to be patient, but >1d seems a bit extreme!?

My newly acquired windows 2008 virtual server now has 3.500 entries (in three days) in its security log, most of which are of event ID 4625: "An account failed to log on".

The login attempts appear rather quick - about 10-20 attempts per second. I guess this is an attack - is that correct?

It does not appear as if the attacker (I'll just use this name) was successful in logging in and brute-forcing the password should not be easy since it is long and complicated...

However, I wonder whether there is something I can do systematically? How about changing the port of rdp? A hardware firewall will probably help?

Moreover, the server now hosts only a single website which is not even public yet, so I didn't expect any traffic of this kind so soon. A little vague: will this get much worse when the site goes online?