MCE on a SBS domain

re: MCE on a SBS domain

bradley — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 19:42:00 GMT

Well there is hope on the horizon. The reason they pulled it was due to the FUS, in the VISTA beta you can now have FUS and be connected to a domain so since they killed that barrier hopefully the next version of MCE will add the domain support back since there won't be a problem with FUS.

re: MCE on a SBS domain

bradley — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 10:32:00 GMT

You can as discussed above add a MCE machine to the domain, however according to a guy from Microsoft I was talking to its actually a bug and was never designed to do so :< so join while you can !

There is one downside. MCE uses Fast User Switching to handle MCE extenders (such as Linksys, XBOX etc) and as you know as soon as a machine is added to the domain FUS is disabled. Thus extenders wont work.

For info MCE runs fine in a VM (VMware or MS VS) and is very cool peice of software.

Its a shame about the domain - I had a project to deliver around 80 MCE machines in a managed apartment block - in a domain, controlled by a SBS domain would have been cool. Hopefully some one from the MCE product team will think about this, especially with SBS being used as a 'home server' these days......

Heres hoping !

re: MCE on a SBS domain

bradley — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 16:46:00 GMT

If you upgrade from versions prior to MCE 2005 you will retain Domain Join functionality.

re: MCE on a SBS domain

bradley — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 14:08:00 GMT

Actually according to Microsoft YOU CAN install MCE into a domain . . . there is simply one catch . . . you must do it during the initial install of the software.

More specifically, if you have a Media Center PC with the software already pre-installed -- you're out of luck. But if you have the software on CD and you are installing on to a bare computer -- during the installation it does give you the chance to join a domain.

This information is from a TS/2 seminar that was given last year by Microsoft in Dedham, Massachusetts. I have not tried this out for myself personally, but it should be a simple matter to test it using Virtual PC.

re: MCE on a SBS domain

bradley — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 13:23:00 GMT

no joke...if mce could join a domain, we'd be installing one within 30 days in our primary conference room.

we originally figured we could use rdp to connect to other machines as needed for stuff on the domain. but i backed off on that. just a bit too kludgy for a very client-visible system.

re: MCE on a SBS domain

bradley — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 10:10:00 GMT

Well, there are hacks that allow you to do that. Here's one of them:
http://www.tss2000.nl/vbforum/showthread.php?p=435#post435
Apparently, the downside of this is that you can't use MCE Extenders. However, if you snoop around on TheGreenButton, you'll find people who claim that they managed to do both - join an ActiveDirectory domain, and use extenders. Can't verify this from personal experience though, as I haven't tried it.
Hubert