THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA"

Sorry to sound like a broken record again, but first I have to rant:

"An enterprise class account will typically have adequate security procedures from a firewall perspective, and also have appropriate intrusion detection systems," said Phil Ernst, president of Convergence Technology Consulting, Bowie, Md., which has performed numerous SP2 deployments for SMB customers. "The SMB space is a mixed bag. Best practices costs money, and in some cases too much for many SMB organizations. Either they lack the internal expertise for controlling updates, lack the funds, or both."  X2 Adoption slow in Enterprise, Picks up in SMB.

I've met some folks in “enterprise class and I can say without a doubt that “best practices“ isn't followed in those enterprise marketplaces any better.  They don't necessarily because of their size have adequate security procedures.

So what "best practices" can you do that we already have the tools for under the hood and just need external expertise from a VAR/VAP to set up [or even one really geeky admin]?

• Controlling updates from the server with SUS
• Group policy
• Password policy
• OWA with SSL encryption
• Remote Web Workplace which has SSL
• We already have a firewall
• You need to add a antivirus program

But the article confirms what I've seen.  Out here in SBSland we're rolling out XP sp2 much more than the big guys.

Remember the resources we have for rolling out XP sp2;

I also spotted this article that says “Business Continuity to suffer“ with the roll out of SP2.  What continutity issues?  What broken applications? I've had NO issues with SP2 on my workstations and all of my applications work just fine.  If the program gets broken with SP2 the program was written poorly in the first place.

The only issue that I noted, and have now fixed, is that my workstation was throwing off a lot of “Event 3019 errors - MRXsmb - The redirector failed to determine the connection type” errors in my system event log and the application of the loopback patch cleaned up my system log files.  After I applied that patch, it cleaned up my log files with no issues.  It wasn't causing any issues, more of a cosmetic thing that was annoying.   The hotfix is available on the download site.  Given that I shut off SMB signing here because of attached printers, I'm thinking it was related a bit to that.  Whatever the reason, my log files are now as they were before.