I also confirmed that they are running Server 2003, I RDP'd into novalogic.com and bam, a Server 2003 login interface came up. They didn't even try to obfuscate the port from anything other than 3389. I'll be surprised if the servers haven't already been breached.

I'm glad NovaHQ is doing what they're doing, but I hope players continue to use NovaWorld for the time being, that way we can get as many players as possible in the lobby. At least when NW goes down, we'll have some place to call home. Since the only game I play is Joint Ops, it will be unfortunate it goes. 

You would have thought that they had at least used some form of firewall to lock it down to access only from set ip's or pools, or most sane admins would do lock it away behind a decent vpn instead.

What i normally do to convert older servers (ive done a few 2003 servers) into virtual machines is to use ghost4linux and take a raw drive clone as an image to a usb drive, normally linux has drivers for some of the older and more obscure raid cards (windows and dos/peboot based clone tools can be a pita to use with raid cards). Then mount the usb drive into the virtual host, pass through to the guest and blow the image to the virtual hard drive, then grow it to the new disk size... After this the battle starts, in the case of many older systems (especially dell) would BSOD when drives run for hardware thats no longer there (due to such an awesome job they did with writing the drives, not), but after some jigger pokery with safe mode and logging the boot process, deleting driver files with linux so they cant start, it eventually works enough to cut the last out using regedit.

From memory you also need to ensure (like xp) to run as IDE vhd's due to the lack of sata support, i think ive a few where after conversion I loaded the older intel matrix drivers and then swapped them over to sata for a little more speed.

I agree for as long as the real lobby works its the place to stay, but i really hope a replacement can be built before it goes, as it will make it much harder to do once its gone as you can only sniff half the traffic.