THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA"

There are some wizards in SBSland that you 'can' run to make your life easier... and then you can skip them for one reason or another... and THEN there are some wizards that ... well.. just let me put you on notice.. if you own/install/run/admin/deal with/look at/even get near a box and don't use these wizards.. you might as well just paint a red X bullseye on your Tshirt as I'll be hunting you down and ensuring that you learn the error of your ways...

Well..actually more likely.. once you screw up the box so much .. you learn yourself why there are some wizards you should just never bypass.....

and the biggie... the granddaddy of the wizards that you should not bypass unless you want me to personally hunt you down... is the basic install wizard of Small Business Server in the first place.  HandyAndy's web site has the screen shots..but make your life and your customer's life easier by letting the box install everything as it wants to be laid down by that SBS installer.  I don't care if you don't use Exchange and use Pop protocol inside of Outlook (ugh).  I don't care if your client doesn't know what Sharepoint is....there just might be a time in your clients future that they might need it and want it and then you'll have to get those bits back on the box.  Thus it's easier to install the SBS box and let it do it's "thing" and then when you are done, then go back and inside the "services" manually disable those services you don't want running.  But do yourself a huge favor and let the box do what it wants do to.  And don't even think that you can install SBS "by hand" like the big server boxes.  Do ensure that user folders and Exchange get moved over to different partitions of course, but don't even think of installing a SBS box by hand the "manual" way.

The next wizard that you should not try to bypass, unless you want a flying 2x4 with "SBS Rocks' emblazoned on it heading your way, is the Connect to Email and Internet Connection Wizard aka the CEICW.  This is detailed in Stephanie's blog..but there's no way that you could manually do what that wizard does in less than a minute by hand.  You'd more than likely forget something if you even tried.  Rule of thumb is CEICW THEN you tweak that firewall (whether it's RRAS or ISA).  This is an extremely important wizard in that it sets the protection and defense layer for your box.  Two nics and that CEICW puts in place the firewall, the open ports, the password policy.  One nic and you need a hardware firewall.  But don't even think about not running that wizard.

Next wizard that it would not be a good thing to bypass is the Change IP address wizard.  If you need to change the internal IP address of the server/network away from whatever IP addressing you chose during the install (the default is 192.168.16.x), you need to run this wizard as it makes sure that all those little bits and pieces of the internal DNS settings are reset.  Trust me.  While you "might" be able to do this one manually.. you'll most likely forget something.

So now we come to the section of the post about those wizards that I'll say ...eh... whatever... no prob... not a biggie if you don't run it.....

Guess which one I think isn't a biggie and there's no flying wood pieces heading your way if you deliberately CHOOSE not to run it?

Give up?

Believe it or not the /connectcomputer wizard.  Yeah while it does quite a few steps, there's a lot in there that I kinda go... eh.. whatever.. it can be manually done and I'm not going to freak out and start aiming the 2x4 at you if you don't use it.  If you have a special way that you set up workstations so that they don't run as local admin at then end of your setup routine?  More power to you!  And ..hands up... how many of us reset the home page in Internet Explorer to NOT be companyweb because the first launch in the morning is slow (yes I know we can hack and resolve that issue) but when it comes to the home page of IE... mine is www.incidents.org

..so what wizards of SBS do you think that should not be bypassed?

What wizards do you bypass?

or the better question of all... what wizards are missing?  SuperG said today that there should be a Change Admin password wizard that would at least change all the admin passwords of the bits and pieces on the SBS box.  It's totally understandable that it shouldn't do third party stuff... but shouldn't SBS be able to handle the Admin password for all it's parts?