[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.] Nothing about a small firm is simple - THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA
Sun, Oct 24 2010 13:35 bradley

Nothing about a small firm is simple

I think SBS has done a disservice in making active directory deployments easy.  Then when one needs to migrate one doesn't realize that this isn't a trivial thing.  For several years...ever since SBS can no longer to an inplace upgrade people have been asking for an easier migration.  Something simple.  But we're overlooking the obvious.  We grow complexity over time.  We add printers and shares and databases and line of business applications and it's not simple anymore.

If there is one thing and one thing only that I will tell you to do before migrating is run the www.sbsbpa.com as that will for sure catch the number one gotcha -- journalwrap errors. 

But people want simple printer migrations and the problem points out the age of printers and the various printer driver issues.

People want an easy exchange migration and the Exchange team has changed the database format between 2003, 2007, and now 2010. 

When we start moving things, making the decisions to move to the cloud there were be issues as well.

The best thing you can do is understand that making something simple never is, and only if you have inflexibility for small businesses will a "Simple" migration occur.

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# You're not kidding

Monday, October 25, 2010 7:54 AM by Joe Raby

I'm trying to run Aurora through it's paces, and wanted to see how well it'll handle different workloads and roles.

My router doesn't support UPnP properly (it's a gimped Vonage V-Portal 1-port router hooked up to a Netgear unmanaged Gbe switch), so I have to set up port forwarding manually.  I wanted to have DaRT boot images on the server, so that meant setting up WDS.  My router doesn't support DHCP options, so that meant installing the DHCP role on the server.  Plus, I have a network printer that I want to have installed on every workstation in the domain.  That means install x64 and x86 print drivers on the server and set up a DHCP reservation and GPO for deployment.  And then I have two wireless access points (one is used in another room as a bridge, hooked to a couple of wired computers).  More DHCP reservations for those...

Is this the kind of setup Microsoft recommends for Aurora?  For the role of uneducated IT Goto Guy for drop-in deployment in an office?  Not bloody likely!

I do still like having all of the network stuff on the server box though.  I do prefer using DHCP reservations over static IPs any day (except for the server, of course).  Using reservations means you can manage them from one spot.  Sometimes I don't bother if DNS updates correctly, but I hate having to go to each device to configure a static IP.