As part of an assessment recently I needed to know if a client had the Transition Pack installed on their Small Business Server - this allows the client to have more than 75 users/devices connected to the server. They were not aware that they had purchased the transition pack (and as it's expensive I would imagine they would know they have purchased it) yet it looked like they had more than 75 user/devices.
Looking online there didn't seem to be any information on how to tell if the pack had been purchased and as it is not something you can download and try, it wasn't possible to just see what happens if it was installed. I also didn't want to suggest that they purchase the software if they already had and it was already installed.
I put a call into Microsoft to find out how to tell if the Transition Pack is installed and the answer is obvious if you think about it, but it doesn't scream out "Transaction Pack".
It would have been nice if it appeared in the Add/Remove Programs but it doesn't. It can appear as a product id but the absence of the id doesn't always imply that it hasn't been installed.
Instead the way to tell is to go into Add/Remove Programs, Windows Components and then see if it is possible to change Terminal Services to application mode. SBS does not support this mode but Windows 2003 does. Obvious now you know the answer, but not an obvious solution if you didn't know the answer.
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There is now a SBSC group on LinkedIn, details at Tim's blog. I've requested that I be added to the membership. If you know me and are also on LinkedIn then feel free to add me to your network, my userid is Helsby.
One (new) client has unfortunately a Vista desktop purchased a couple of days before we took over IT and it needed joining to the domain. This has proved a difficult task to say the least. Our remote control software stops showing the users screen whenever the UAC prompt pops up (and freezes our screen until the local user clicks ok) which means the end user has to remain at their desk when we are doing any troubleshooting rather than letting them use another computer to do some work.
Anyway, the server/connectcomputer wizard was complaining that I needed admin rights (which I had already) and a patch is available, KB926505 but when I try to install that on the server I get the very wonderful error message "Failed to install" with no details as to why. Nothing in the eventlogs either. Add/Remove Programs now says the patch is installed and when you try to remove it, I get a message about all sorts of programs failing to work and the end of the world so I've left it in place until I get a chance to remove and reinstall the server whilst I am on site as opposed to RWW'ing into the server. In the meantime I joined the computer to the domain manually, and I've had to change the logon script so it doesn't UAC whenever the script does the sbs setup program. Apparently this is fixed with the patch, so the patch obviously doesn't work - watch this space.
A good source for SBS'ers is going to be the SBS2003 Technical Library. This is actually a subset of the SBS Technical library although there doesn't seem to be anything else under this heading apart from SBS2003. I guess this will change as SBS2008 gets released. Thanks Peter Gallagher
I'm in the middle of a Swing Migration and received the message ""this server has a trust relationship with domain.local" after continuing the standard setup (after I've done most of the hard work migrating the existing settings). It took me a while to hunt down, but this is solved by editing a registry value and rebooting as per the details on Jared Griego's sbs blog and at event id. I'm posting the details in the extended entry for safe keeping. Not sure why it happened, I guess there was a stage missed in editing AD or dns, but it all looked ok after double and triple checking.
One of our users lost their mobile phone in the snow and I needed to initiate remote wipe of the device. I downloaded and installed the MobileAdmin pack but whenever I went into the Wipe page I would get a 403 error as below
he remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.Exception Details: System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden.
Source Error:
An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.
Stack Trace:
[WebException: The remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden.]
System.Net.HttpWebRequest.CheckFinalStatus() +680
System.Net.HttpWebRequest.EndGetRequestStream(IAsyncResult asyncResult) +74
System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetRequestStream() +234
Microsoft.Exchange.AirSync.Admin.Mailbox.propFindRequest(String deviceUri) +240
Microsoft.Exchange.AirSync.Admin.Mailbox.getDevices() +194
Microsoft.Exchange.AirSync.Admin.Devices.refreshDevicesTable() +135
Microsoft.Exchange.AirSync.Admin.Devices.Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) +190
System.Web.UI.Control.OnLoad(EventArgs e) +67
System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() +35
System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain() +750
The advice at Experts Exchange mentioned that you need to remove require ssl to the exadmin directory in sbs, a fact backed up at Vladville. Shortly afterwards the phone was wiped.
It is pretty scary when a server component crashes when you press the help button - especially on the first day that a server is live - apparently it's a Conflict of the psapi.dll
If you get an alert from Small Business Server stating :The following disk is low on free disk space. ......Drive letter: HarddiskVolume17" (in my case) this is typically caused by a usb drive being unplugged without going through safe removal. The alert will get sent every day until the server is rebooted. You can also reduce the chance of this happening again by optimizing the drive for quick removal as per this post on Experts Exchange
I've posed a puzzler at Friends In Tech about an issue I had when upgrading a NT4 domain to Small Business Server 2003. It will be interesting to see if anyone comes up with the correct answer but also to get some responses from other techs and hopefully it will encourage conversations on the website and forums.
A very nice write up on how to tell if SBS 2003 R2 is installed - of course running winver.exe would be much nicer and consistent with the other versions of Microsoft's os.
It was interesting to see that details about the packaging for Windows Vista was released today - JCXP links to MS Tech today which has a picture of the neat dvd box. Contrast this to the cd's that I received from Dell for the SBS 2003r2 server I opened. Not only was the media on CD (which means a painful 4 cd install after Dell's install creates a small 25gb boot partition) despite the server having a dvd drive, but the cd's were in the paper sleeve envelopes that you normally get with an OS installation from Dell. What was worse that disks 1 and 2 were in the same envelope with a piece of paper slid between them, the same for disk 3 and 4. This is really cheap, likely to lead to scratches and not a good first start impression of a brand new server!
(Note that I don't know if SBS was requested on cd instead of dvd or whether that is how it comes but even if it was ordered on cd, it could at least come in a reliable case.
I've also started reading The Lazy Admin, not because I'm lazy, but because it has some interesting stuff including sbs and vista (the former being the reason I discovered the blog after looking at SBS Myth Busting
I can't remember why I needed this at the moment (I am going through some emails I sent to myself to blog), but there is information about how to fix the 0x80070003 errors when synching with Windows Update Services.
Although I had to delay my test until this afternoon as my planned test date of yesterday was full, I passed my Small Business Exam, 70-282 this afternoon with a score of 925 - although not 1000 like my past test, still a respectable score that I'm pleased with.
The very first question had nothing to do with SBS (as did most of the questions) and was something I'd never heard of or probably need to do - it was how about how to migrate a dhcp server settings from a real environment to a test environment (hopefully that is vague enough to not get in trouble for breaking the NDA).
Some of the questions were very easy and very obvious but some of the questions were very ambiguous so I had no idea what the right answer was. They were things like "in this scenario, what are the two biggest risks?" when the choices are critical/security patches not installed, no antivirus defs, ISA client not installed and ISA server not uptodate. Apart from the first choice it's very difficult to distinguish which is the next biggest risk - especially in a real world scenario.
Anyway, now that I have passed this exam I have another exam under my MCSE belt taken care of - 5 more to go :-( Once the results are submitted to Microsoft I also become a Small Business Specialist and gain entry into the exclusive Small Business Specialist Community. My company also benefits as they gain this competency/specialist too.
Had a good days training at the Small Business Exam Cram today. Today was mainly focussed on the Sales & Marketing aspect of the system but we also went through the initial install and configuration of the server. Everyone had a laptop with SBS running in a virtual pc and it was soooooo slow. It was comforting to find that it was slow on these laptops though as I was wondering if I had something wrong on my install of sbs on my own laptop which was also incredibly slow (although once the system is up and running it's not too bad).
During lunch, most of the attendees got out their work laptops and surfed to get email, messages from work, did some work or in some cases just watched the IT Crowd from Channel 4 which you can't get in america now :-(
Anyway - the funny thing was that the couple of guys behind me were complaining about how bad the network was after everyone had fired their laptops up - and blaming it on the bandwidth hogs of vpn, remote desktop and other such tools (that I was using). Mind you - you'd be crazy to not use vpn or rdp in a room of techies as there were quite a few copies of ethereal and network sniffers running. What I did find amazing was that the people using outlook2003 all complained that they weren't able to contact their servers back at the office due to the bandwidth requirements, but I had the once in a lifetime opportunity of saying "If you were using Lotus Notes you wouldn't have that problem" and actually meaning it. Normally I'm *blaming* Lotus Notes for causing me problems.
We were given homework to do tonight - to complete the Sales and Marketing assessment which was actually fairly easy - especially as you can keep retaking it (for free) until you achieve a passing score - it took me 2 attempts! The scary thing about this is that you are then halfway to becoming a Small Business Specialist, and so is the company that you work for. Some discussion this morning took place about Best Buy and the Geek Squad going for Small Business Training and how they were trying to get the Small Business Specialist certification - this was a worrying prospect for a lot of the consultants as they can't compete on price (which a lot of small businesses will focus on) and they are nervous about the fact that it is unlikely that the Geek Squad are going to do a very good job. It was even more disconcerning when I pointed out that in theory the GeekSquad only needs *1 person* to get the qualification and then the whole company, countrywide, can claim Small Business Specialist accreditation. To me that is just wrong (although it was pointed out that it is more likely that each branch is going to go for accreditation individually) but it does make you think........
