THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA

<with special thanks to the fabulous, beautiful, charming and brilliant Lanwench who graciously allowed me to steal this from something she wrote about her thoughts about SBS.  In this post she lists all the things about SBS that may [will?] drive Enterprise Admins to drink about SBS>

Some things that people will need to watch out for – especially after they do it the “old fashioned” way the first time and then realize that some features don’t work right:

• When setting up workstations themselves, don’t name them what you want to end up with – you have to add the computer accounts using the wizard and then pick the name you wish for that PC during /connectcomputer
• Don’t change OU names, or move computers out of the SBSComputers OU – if you don’t create the computer accounts with the wizard, or if you rename OUs or move a lot of things like group policy won’t work right, annoyingly!
• Don’t move users out of the default OU either
• I believe that the template account one uses when creating new users with the wizard doesn’t set up roaming profile paths (not sure) [Susan – no it doesn’t, this is another wizard]
• During the SBS Setup, presuming one has configured one’s hardware RAID already & created the system partition, one can simply cancel out of the wizard when it’s time to select the paths for various things like the users’ home directories, data folders, profile folders, etc – can create the additional partitions/assign drive letters as needed, and then click the ResumeSetup shortcut on the desktop. The doc/wizard doesn’t make this obvious. Or, one can alt+tab to computer management/disk management & create the Exchange/data partitions then, and then go back to the setup wizard
• User quotas are enabled by default (I think) – if one is like me, and hates these, turn it off manually [Susan – by default and yes I turn them off as well]
• Circular logging is enabled by default in Exchange – if one chooses to use NTBackup instead of SBS Backup, this will not be changed, and must be deselected manually in ESM
• (I don’t remember whether the mailbox quotas are set up by default on the store, or, if they are, whether the dangerous “third trigger” is set – I don’t like or use that one) [Susan  - on by default, I also turn them off]
• The CEICW needs to be run as it is entirely possible to do everything it does manually, but it takes a lot of steps – in IIS, access to OWA and RWW, etc., will by default be set up to deny connections from anything other than localhost & the LAN IP range
• The POP connector may sound like a great thing, but don’t use it – get your client to register a domain name & host his own mail. POP is for clients to talk to servers, not for servers to talk to servers…and you shouldn’t turn your server into a client anymore than you should turn your server into a router (the latter is the opinion of this writer and does not reflect the editorial stance of this station)

Note: SBS is a great bargain, but you have to do a tradeoff of sorts. You can get an SBS network functioning pretty well without using the wizards for some stuff, but not all of it (until MS decides to release a painfully detailed doc outlining *exactly* what, and where, the wizards do stuff). IT Pros may not like “black boxes” (I don’t!) but for the price point on SBS it’s worth it to most small businesses – so one has to cede a degree of granular control if one wants things to run properly. It is *always* good to know what is happening under the hood of any system – wizards should not be a substitute for knowledge, but just give up & run the wizards and it will work out all right. There is probably a therapy support group for enterprise-product admins who have gone through this. I’m looking for one.