I'm trying to set up portal 10.3.1, and it's for a municipality. They have a server set up, but it is currently only being used via the intranet, and has no web hosting set up. The networking guys would like to keep it offline. I have a server for portal, which is installed and whatnot, but is there a way to set up the server to connect to the portal without having the server online?
I'm a little unclear on your question but I think this might be what you're after:
You can register some or all of the services from AGS with Portal and set up appropriate permissions on the registered services. AGS and Portal can be at different versions in this scenario.
Or you can Federate AGS with Portal but they have to be on the same version.
You also need to consider if you need a Hosting Server with Portal and its associated DataStore (a managed database) for Feature Layers.
There is a very easy way to make a Portal that's an all in one box (Hosting Server, Data Store, web adapters and Portal) by using Chef and Esri's Chef cookbooks.
See: Get Started With ArcGIS Cookbook · Esri/arcgis-cookbook Wiki · GitHub
Ah! This seems to fix my problem. I just didn't have a single stack machine because the instructions said server and portal couldn't be on the same machine. I'll give this a try.