SBS 2003

SBS 2003 Old Hardware to New Hardware

I wonder is it just getting that easy for me to move a SBS 2003 server from old hardware to new hardware or am I just getting the process down better?  It use to be we would bring the new server in join the domain and then make it a DC and then once you had all of that unplug it off the network and then upgrade the server to SBS 2003. Move data and then export email and bring it in and then re-point the workstations once you bring the new server in the network for Exchange and such.

Not so much anymore as I have taken a job that use to take 2 days to one that I did last night in 4.5 hours. The last one I did this way took 6.5 hours so something is going on here. Basically I use one of my favorite tools and that is Shadow Protect IT version to backup the server and then use it to restore onto the new hardware and loading the new RAID driver in the process of restore it is just that easy. Why waste 2 days when you can cut this down to half a day? Well some would say when you are cutting down billable time you could have had then and that is hurting you. What I say is you are becoming more efficient and can do more jobs. Who is the customer going to remember? The one that took 2 days to do the work or the one that did it in 4.5 with no problems and saved them money and was still done properly and in a good manner? You tell me but I bet they remember you and what you did for them and their bottom line.

Til later just Roger

Is it vacation time yet?

I don’t know about any of you out there but I have been busier than busy the last 4 or 5 months and it seems like more than normal. Are you experiencing this in your world or has it been slow for you? I know I was talking to one of our other techs who concentrates more on the networking side and he has been in the same boat as me. 

Plus my wife and I are looking into adding onto our house. So add this to my work and there is not a lot of time left in the day and that is not counting the normal everyday things that comes with having 3 boys in the house yet from Plays, Band, Marching Band, Choirs, Track, and whatever thing they have going on and the 4 out on their own that still play into what you have going on and it can be plain nuts at a time.  Ok most of the time but it is rather enjoyable keeps you young.

But we are going to Disney World in June for 2 weeks so that is something to look forward to so of course there has been going over the books and things to do and one thing we did was get ourselves a rental town home right outside of Disney world. This saves us the cost of the on-site sleeping arrangements and the ability to come and go pretty much as and when and whatever we please to. Plus we can eat there before adventuring off for the day. I can’t wait for this to get here.

Til Later just Roger

SBS 2003 and SBS 2008 are they that good?

I don’t know about any of you out there if you have noticed this but on the sites I have SBS 2003 or SBS 2008 running you don’t get those calls for support that much anymore? I can give you a classic example on what I am talking about.

My wife’s business has about 18 users and they use to replace their workstations 6 every year so everyone got a new one every 3rd year. That worked well but there was always something and it was not unusual for me to be on-site 2 to 3 times a week with some kind of problem on the workstations or server. They also had a NT 4.0 Server. So we moved to SBS 2000 which gave them email and ISA and a lot more functionality with what they could do but we still had those support calls. So we introduced a Windows 2000 Terminal Server in the Environment and started replacing the workstations with WYSE 1200 devices. This in costs of replacing the workstations alone saved her about 15k to 20k she figured over 3 years and that included the cost of the new TS Server as we moved from the workstations to the WYSE devices just on equipment. This started the trend of me not being on site so much as we got rid of the workstations and moved in the dumb devices. We still had issues with the Servers at times as Windows 2000 goes.

We then upgraded the SBS 2000 server to a SBS 2003 server running ISA and we upgraded the Terminal Server to Windows 2003. When we did this we removed the last of the workstations except for 3 of them as they needed them to be PCs. Big drop in on-site time from 2 to 3 times a week to maybe 1 or twice a month maybe. We replaced the 2003 TS Server with new hardware and that became a very stable server. Then this last November we replaced the SBS 2003 server with SBS 2008 and I haven’t been there since. Now to my bottom line that is not a good thing but to hers that is great as her IT costs are down to nothing. I am sure there will be times where they will have something but for the most part as you can see things have been progressively getting better for the customer. We run HP ML 350’s at her location and I think that is a big help with the servers for server hardware stability.

Too me the adding a TS Server to the Enviroment along with SBS getting better with each new progression has made for a very stable customer experence. I also see this same thing at the other locations I take care of so is it just me and being lucky or is all really becoming that good.

Til Later just Roger

SBS 2003 and SBS 2008

I know this blog is suppose to be all about SBS 2003 and SBS 2008 but sometimes there is not a lot of things happening at the moment and I am off on other missions. One thing nice about the SBS 2003 and SBS 2008 Servers I have out there is they just plain run with no problems bad for me but good for the clients makes them happy when they don’t have to worry about their server which makes me look good and when they do need to do something who they going to go with the Box or the person?

I can’t say enough about the stability of the SBS 2008 servers I have out there now, we have not had to do anything with them since the migration other than the clients doing the updates and also checking the backups. One thing I will be doing in a week or so it take a SBS 2003 Server on old hardware and running out of drive space and moving this to new hardware. The customer is really concerned about downtime so it is a Friday evening move for this to happen. I have a 12 hour window to get the job down and I will be posting on how that goes but my goal is the use the Storage Craft Shadow Protect software to do this. If you have not checked the product out yet I sure would be downloading the trial and trying it out you won’t be disappointed. One little trick with this software is to be sure you have your RAID drivers loaded on the USB Drive you are using for the migration and to select the HIR option and specifying the folder you have the drivers in. I have had to do the C Drive twice to get the drivers to inject into the restore but it sure beats doing the whole server install from scratch or a swing migration. I will work on that ISA documentation and get it out after the weekend.

Til Later just Roger

Standard Server 2003 Migration to SBS 2008 Part 4

I have had some questions about once you do the migration how do i get the users to show up in the SBS 2008 Console. Here is my reply to one of those questions and hopefully it will help those that is looking for this answer.

“In your SBS 2008 Console go to Users and then over to the right you will see “Change User Role for user accounts” select this and then this will start a wizard. Select Standard User and “Replace User Permissions or Roles” hit next here you will see the users on your SBS 2008 Server but if you check the box that says “Display all user accounts in AD” this will show you your users you are looking for. You highlight the ones you want and add them and the wizard will do the rest. You will have to do this for the ones you want as Standard users and also again for the ones you want to have Administrative permissions. Also if you are wanting your computers and Servers to show up in their respective lists you add these to the SBS Computers and Servers OU’srespectively and then they will show up in your SBS 2008 console.”

Til later just Roger

SBS 2003 and Wild Blue

I am sure others have had this experience with a Wild Blue connection but this was my first. This was a new customerthat was 4 hours away and we sold the server over the phone and I thought I had asked all the questions I should have but not true I forgot one important one and assumed they was in town. Which in all actually they was outside of the town about 5 miles. So they had Wild Blue for a Internet connection, I had asked can you get a static IP and they checked and the answer was yes and I had asked do they block any ports and they checked no they don’t. But I did not ask any names anything like that of the ISP. Me bad and yes I can admit me bad.

So I get on-site get the server all setup and going which I did try SBS 2008 first but we couldn’t make the legacy LOB App work  so I rolled them with SBS 2003 R2 and then we went to address the Internet stuff which I could not make any connections to the server from the outside. So a call to support and no they say we don’t block ports so more testing thinking I had the router wrong. Nope this all looked good more digging and I hit the web and find others with this problem. When they say they are not blocking ports that is true they are smashing the packets in all actuality so you can’t do what the customer wants. Ok the customer calls back and asks them why did they sell them a Business Class service if that was not a true statement. No answer from them on that this is the way it is to them and the customer is hung with a contract and a buy out if they want to get out of it. We did find another service that will do the satellite and allow anything to come in but more equipment to be purchased. So we are exploring a couple of ways to go which this is one of them and now the ISP in town has wireless and they will find out if this will work next week. Bottom line if you have a customer that mentions Wild Blue tell them run screaming away from that call and find something else.

Til later just Roger

SBS 2003 and OWA

We had another site with OWA having issues and I am wondering if this was a problem with maybe a update that came down or was actually just something that came up. But they was getting the 500 error and Site busy from the outside when OWA was tried to go to. What they ended up doing was running this

We had to sync IUSR and IWAM

Used this piece of flotsam

We used the /inetpub/AdminScripts for this.

The syntax we used:

cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/anonymoususerpass “f00″

cscript adsutil.vbs get w3svc/anonymoususerpass (reports correct password)

cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/wamuserpass “f00″

cscript adsutil.vbs get w3svc/wamuserpass (reports correct password)

To sync the passwords with IIS we used:

cscript.exe synciwam.vbs -v

2^nd time through it worked

Til later just Roger

Exchange 2003 Server SP 2 Install Error

One of our techs had a Exchange 2003 SP2 server that the OWA quit working and I suggested that he do  a Exchange 2003 reinstall. That usually clears up any of these quirky Exchange 2003 problems if you can’t get it correct and of course when he went to install SP2 got the “there is an earlier version of the exchange intelligent message filter installed” So I had this fix for a SBS 2003 Server which it is still Exchange 2003 and this allowed him to get SP 2 installed. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935916

He got this all done and the OWA would come up but with a 500 error inside and from the outside I would get a “The requested resource is in use.” Error so I did a quick search and found this and this corrected the problem for him regsvr32 %windir%/system32/vbscript.dll life was good and now he has his weekend back.

Til Later just Roger

SBS 2003 with ISA 2004 Internal Client VPN Problems

I had a customer who has a SBS 2003 SP1 Server with ISA 2004 who uses a VPN off their client machines to a site that they submit claims too using the ATT Global Dialer. Well I got the sheet from them on Ports and IP’s that needed to be allowed to do there certain parts and got them all added but the workstations still would not connect. They keep getting error 223 VPN port in use. I finally tracked it down to on the SBS Server I had to go to the registry and add Port 4500 to HKey_Local_Machine\system\CurrentControlSet\Service\Tcpip\Parameters  in the Reserved Ports and I had to add 4500-4500 and then I could allow a VPN to initiate from the inside out. It seems to be the problem that a certain Windows Update allowed something else to take over this port. Once I defined this as reserved then the Clients was good. When I get the exact article I will post that info also.

Til later just Roger

SBS 2003 to Exchange 2007 migration Part 5

Well the server from hell started to blue screen this week. It was a SBS 2003 server that someone had decided to treat the server as one would for a Enterprise Server and had it all messed up. This server had many issues and that was one of the reasons that this customer decided to spilt off the parts onto Full Server Servers. Last week when I had been onsite I had done a Sharepoint backup and what I could so we could remove the Exchange 2003 Server and demote this server down. Well that was not the case as the server started to Blue Screen come Monday so the onsite IT guy said no more and shut it down.

I got onsite yesterday and made sure that was what we was going to do for sure and I then went through the process of cleaning AD up from the failed DC and seized the roles over to the Main 2008 DC and cleaned AD and DNS and all those fun parts that are still there. I have the matter of cleaning the orphaned Exchaneg server out of AD so the Exchange 2007 server don’t think it is there anymore. Ya know there is really no good articles on this process and I am still trying to find that article that will help clean up the Exchange 2007 Server from the reminants of the Exchange 2003. When I get that tracked down I will let you know but for the most part looking back on this whole deal it was really simple to do other than all the problems had with the SBS 2003 Server. I did get the Sharepoint restored onto a 2003 Server running in HyperV and that went over real good as the customer had figured it was gone. Now it is getting the new ISA 2006 server in place and publishing either 2008 TS Gateway or a Terminal Server they was still kicking that one around will see where that goes for sure. Well it is off to a weekend of fun at the Great Wolf Lodge in Kansas City with all my children except for my oldest he and his son. They will be missed but the rest of us sure will be thinking of them as we will be playing in the 84 degree warm swimming area.

Til later just Roger