Till later just Roger

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=86A1AA32-9814-484E-BD43-3E42AEC7F731&displaylang=en

Til later just Roger

Til later just Roger

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

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

Til Later just Roger

This customer also had a series of bad luck with their servers from lightning strikes to other misfortunes and the current pain was space on the server. They are accounts so they keep everything and have started to scan images. So when i first proposed this to them they was very doubtful and I know one of the partners made a comment that “it can’t be that easy” well yes it was and yes it is. I also had a time window of 6 PM Friday evening to 6 AM Saturday morning because it is that time of year for them being it is tax season and all. Sure we had one hiccup but nothing that was life altering or effected the server any.

I would suggest checking out the product and seeing where it fits on your bag of tricks but this one I am liking more and more everyday. Here is what we did basically

I have a trial copy of Shadow Protect IT version that I used for this and I booted the old server to the disk and selected the 2003 option and when it came up and asked about starting networking I just canceled. I had also plugged in by 500 Gig USB Drive that I had borrowed from my wife’s business for this purpose before I booted. But once I had booted to the disk I selected backup and specified the USB drive to backup to and the 3 drives on the server we was running out of room on. The backup took probably a hour to hour and half to complete. I then downloaded the RAID Driver for the HP ML 350 G5 we was rolling in and extracted the files to a folder on the disk. I then booted the new server defined the RAID level and booted to the Shadow Protect disk using the same options and answers from the old server backup. I then set my partitions for the 3 drive sets and started the restore. Because we was going to new hardware I had to select the HIR restore and specify the folder that has the RAID drivers in it. Well the actual restore of the C drive took about 15 minutes but I noticed it did not inject the RAID drivers. Been down this path before so I did the C Drive again and selected the HIR option again but this time instead of low matches I selected Excellent meaning it was going to prompt me for the drivers for the 46 different parts it don’t reconize. So I skip my way to number 43 which is the RAID driver and it loaded the driver and we went to restoring the rest of the server.  This all completed in about 4 hour or so and when the server booted from the restore I had to go in and fix the drive letters on the E and S drive but that was it. I always boot into Safe Mode with networking anyways and load the HP Drivers for all devices and make sure the drive letters are what they need to be.

We got that all done and had the server up and running and called the customer at midnight and had them check the server from home before we left but they connected with RWW and it was that easy things just worked. I called and check on the customer on Saturday morning and things was humming along like they should be and I think they still couldn’t believe it was that easy. I know your thinking why not just migrate them to SBS 2008 a lot of that was the reason we did not is because of the programs the have running on the server right now do not support 2008 or 64 bit or I should say there LOB is not approved to run on it. But customer was happy was the bottom line of the whole adventure.

Til later just Roger

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

Til later just Roger

On your ISA Server on the External Nic properties you would define it’s IP as 10.10.1.1 Subnet of 255.255.255.0 and it’s gateway would be 10.10.1.2 this is your Sonic Walls LAN IP. On the Sonic Wall when you have set this up when you go through the setup Wizard the LAN and the WAN IP’s are defined which makes the whole process pretty darn easy. Once this is completed you would login to your SW and go to the Firewall Rules. I am using a Sonic Wall with the Basic Firmware on it and not the Enhanced OS that is a few more steps but for you that are familiar with the OS this will be a snap. You go to the Firewall Rules and Create the Rules for 443 and set it to allow and then from all on the WAN and point this to 10.10.1.1 on the LAN and do the same for Port 25 and Port 987. That is all you have to do on the Sonic Wall now to the ISA Server but the same logic will hold true for whatever type of device you have setting in front of the ISA Server if that is the choice you make. Or if you have nothing in front of this and you can ignore all of this and now on to setting up the ISA Server.

Til later just Roger