The other steveb - Steve Banks' Blog on SBS, EBS, and other Small Business Technology Topics : SBS 2003

BPOS Sync Tool does not migrate passwords

steveb — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 01:32:00 GMT

Had this question come up today, so thought I'd drop a quick post on it. The Directory Synchronization tool used with Microsoft's Online Services does a one-way sync from your Active Directory up to the BPOS servers, and does not migrate passwords. You have to do those manually, and if you change a password in your local AD, it must be updated manually on the BPOS side.

See the Microsoft Online Services "About Directory Synchronization" page for the official wording on it.

Migrating from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008? Update your SBS08 help file first!

steveb — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:31:00 GMT

Thank you Steve Holland for getting the word out on this. Doing a Microsoft migration from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008? Download the latest (as of this blog post) migration help file to your SBS08 box BEFORE you start.

SBS Tech Writer Steve Holland is now on Twitter

steveb — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:11:00 GMT

If you work with Small Business Server, make sure you follow Steve Holland's Twitter feed. I've known Steve since 2003 when he attended our first PSSBS meeting in Seattle. Also check out his team blog on MSDN. He may have moved to southern California, but he's still a good guy. ;-)

Microsoft CSS earned their award!

steveb — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 05:12:00 GMT

You all deserved the award! We were honored to present it to you!

Check out the Official SBS Blog for a picture of the Outstanding Community Supporter Award the SBS MVPs presented to them on behalf of the Small Business Server community. They earned it for the great work they have done over the past year, and past years! :-)

Does Doyenz have their head in the clouds you ask?

steveb — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:05:00 GMT

"Suspended high among the pastel clouds of Bespin, held aloft by huge repulsorlifts built into its curved frame, is a floating metropolis of sophisticated beauty and political freedom. Cloud City exists not only as a mining colony, extracting valuable Tibanna gas from the depths of the giant planet, but also as a sanctuary for those trying to escape the turmoil gripping the galaxy." Oh, sorry, wrong cloud. ;-)

Ran across a post regarding Doyenz today by Joe Panettieri over at MSPmentor, Will Small Business Server Move Into the Clouds? I do not work for Doyenz, have not signed a partner agreement with them as of yet, and do not know where Doyenz may ultimately go as a company, but I do know what I've heard from them over the past twelve months and I don not think that their initial concept/business model has changed in the past five of those months.

Doyenz first showed up, in the form of their CTO, Przemek Pardyak, as an attendee at a PSSBS user group meeting back in November of 2007. At that time, I had no idea who Przemek, or the company was. Przemek emailed me in December to introduce himself again and but I didn't pursue a conversation at the time.

Jump ahead to March, 2008, when a customer of mine emails an introduction to Doyenz CEO, Ashutosh Tiwary, over to me:

-----Original Message-----
From: C...
Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2008 11:24 AM
To: 'Ashutosh Tiwary'; Steven Banks
Subject: Intro btw CEO Doyenz & Steven Banks

Steven,

This morning I had the opportunity to spend an hour with Ashutosh, an
opportunity you should mirror. He created a startup that uses the notion of
a virtual machine to automate the provisioning of SBS-like services to small
and medium sized companies. He is super passionate about the segment and
knows that he wants to build a product that you and your community will
adopt and promote. As such he needs a community of like-minded souls for
feedback and guidance. Please take the chance to meet with him; I know
you're both very busy but each of you has a lot to offer the other.

Regards & thanks,

C...

Based off of my client's introduction and a subsequent meeting in person with Ashutosh at a Starbucks in Bellevue, I set up an event for our Puget Sound Small Business Server user group that coincided with the last night of Microsoft's 2008 MVP Summit, and Ashutosh had what I believe to be his first public presentation of his company, what they had envisioned for their service offering, and a rough time-line of when they would have something tangible to show us, and how he saw it as a progression in how those in the room had been doing business up to this point in the SMB / SBS space.

While there were many heated, sparked discussions that night, especially a very enjoyable devil's advocate "what-if" game played by Jeff Middleton and Henry Craven across a few rows of seats from each other, complete with choosing others in the room to represent their employees and businesses effected by their scenarios, one thing came out of that discussion that really hit home. This was reiterated by Ashutosh in October, when he met with us again prior to his launch at SMB Nation in Seattle. This is my translation of what I heard: Doyenz is not looking to be a cloud hosting company. They are creating a service offering that leverages economy of scale and deals with different providers, like Kaseya, to offer the SMB space a low cost solution that funnels services through Doyenz. They are positioning themselves as a servicing corporation to the SMB partner community. By going to Kaseya, the example mentioned by Panettieri in his article, and to others they are striking agreements with, they are signing deals based on an estimated number of potential end users, then bundling the services and providing the SMB partner/reseller an opportunity to use those services as part of the Doyenz virtualized delivery system as a whole package. Doyenz adds to the services by giving the partner/reseller a scripted vending machine type of approach where you go to the vending machine, I mean Doyenz Website, you place your order for an SBS 2003 Server, and you then pick up your end product out of the slot at the bottom of the machine in a few hours. What you do with that end image is completely up to you. You can run it on a customer premise server(s), you can host it at a collocation facility of your choice, or you can host it at your own facility. They really don't care, and are not in the "cloud" business. They are in the business of collecting a monthly revenue stream resulting from the collection of services they are packaging for your usage and the ability for you to take the server they created for you and to update it in a virtual sandbox that Doyenz does host, where you can make changes and test things out before dropping them on a live production box, and then at night or an off-time you choose, you can shut down the production virtualized box, and update the image with the changes you have instructed it to do by your actions performed on the sandbox machine. Doyenz does not want you to run your boxes in their sandbox as a cloud based service. The only individuals making the choice of whether Doyenz is part of a cloud solution are you and your end customer. If you really wanted to, you could take a Doyenz virtualized deployment and do a virtual to physical move and be done with them. But the beauty of their solution lies in their package of services for a very low monthly cost, with the incredible opportunity to use scripts and test updates on a "live copy" if you will, of your customer's production server, and then with the click of a mouse, instruct the Doyenz system to apply those scripts and updates after hours to the customer's box.

So while the MSPmentor article is correct in that Doyenz does have, and I'm sure are still creating, quiet relationships in the background with Kaseya and others, their motive is not to put SBS in the cloud. Their motive is to put SBS into a Doyenz virtualized environment on whatever hardware or hosted solution you choose, and then for Doyenz to be the value-add you will be excited to pay a monthly service fee to for the life of that server because you are getting a great amount of value from the bundle of those quiet relationships they have created and from their own technology that drew you to Doyenz in the first place, the ability to test and apply changes in an automated fashion without having to risk damage to the actual server.

I welcome your comments and ideas around this.

Steve

Do not install IPv6 on your SBS 2003 box

steveb — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 14:24:00 GMT

I owe the .NET team an apology for blaming them as the original cause of the problems described in this post. The pro and con of blog posting is that we can fire off a post and later find out there was a different cause for the effect we were hit with. So sorry guys and gals for coming down on you so hard. Figured with the SBS 2008 issues we've been seeing after 3.5 SP1 that they were spilling over to SBS 2003 as well. - Steve

This post was originally called - .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 when I wrote it last Saturday, the 21st of February. While I still recommend running the .NET family updates mentioned below, the reason the SBS box went into a tail spin turned out to be installation of IPv6 we did while testing an app on the box that happened to coincide within the same week the .NET SP had been applied. Confirmed this today. With the application vendor on the phone, I re-ran their installer and configuration tool and the server decided it was time to restart:

---------------------------

System Shutdown

---------------------------

The system is shutting down. Please save all work in progress and log off. Any unsaved changes will be lost. This shutdown was initiated by NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM. Shutdown will begin in 44 seconds. Shutdown message: Windows must now restart because the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) service terminated unexpectedly.

---------------------------

This looked extremely familiar to last week's issue, so now we had a culprit. What we looked at next was that the application (we're in pre-beta testing so can't give out the name at the moment) was using Teredo to tunnel out over IPv6 and would install IPv6 if it didn't see it installed. By going into netsh we were able to remove the protocol. I'm including the command to remove IPv6 from your SBS 2003 if you by chance decide to install it on your box too and need to get it off of there. It broke RPC over HTTP, POP3, and IMAP4 Exchange Protocols in addition to the box "forgetting" it was an SBS box as shown below in the original post. Here's what you need to type to remove it (do not remove from SBS 2008 boxes, you need it on there).

type: netsh <ENTER>

at the prompt type: interface ipv6 uninstall <ENTER>

You will be prompted to restart the server after it completes.

So, again, sorry to the .NET team for the error in placing blame.

For those of us in the SBS world, we have a love/hate, with mostly hate, relationship with .NET Framework updates. Seems they are always causing trouble with our boxes. Turns out the recent .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 is no exception, both on Small Business Server 2008 and Small Business Server 2003. While it is supposed to fix 25+ issues in .NET, my personal SBS 2003 production box reacted so badly with it that the box had no idea it was running SBS anymore. When I attempted to run the CEICW in an effort to bring back my RPC over HTTP / Outlook Anywhere functionality that had died after running with the update for a few days, here's the error it came back with:

I was also having "issues" with POP3 and IMAP4 (we use SSL on each of these for specific tasks at our office) protocols stopping after either an iisreset or a full restart of the server. Strange thing with those protocols was that their respective services were still running. Figure that one out.

I restored the system drive from a StorageCraft ShadowProtect image last night to get the machine back on its feet. I personally have left 3.5 SP1 on our box and added the update patches that are supposed to resolve the problems the Service Pack is causing with our boxes; using our company's server as a guinea pig before putting the service pack or subsequent update suite of three patches into production at client sites. Personally, I will not install .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 without these fixes on any box I touch now. I'd recommend you do the same for any machines you admin and ensure you have a very good back up before playing with these or any updates. ;-)

Steve

Secure IMAP in SBS 2003 with ISA 2004

steveb — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:56:00 GMT

Eriq Neale wrote this post in September, 2007. Given that I referenced it yet again today while configuring a customer's SBS 2003 R2 Premium with ISA 2004 to get IMAPS running for an employee's Mac at their house so they could use Apple Mail and IMAP, I figured I would drop a quick note of thanks here to Eriq and link to it for my own quick reference to dig it up again later. ;-)

Thanks Eriq! Thanks to Tim too for encouraging you to write it up!

Steve

Caching in on your SBS 2003 Software Assurance benefits to get SBS 2008

steveb — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 08:51:00 GMT

Last Thursday at our monthly Puget Sound Small Business Server User Group (www.pssbs.org) we had the question come up from one of our members who is trying to figure out where his SA benefits are in the Software Assurance world of eOpen. He was only sent part of the full suite of updated software he was expecting from Microsoft. For the definitive answer we went to Eric Ligman (of course, who else do we turn to for all that is licensing and Microsoft). He in turn led us over to his blog for the answer. Check out the two blog posts listed below for the steps involved if you are have SBS 2003 SA benefits and want to get your SBS 2008 bits.

How do we get the SBS Software Assurance benefits such as: Outlook 2007, Entourage 2008, ISA 2006 + additional Windows Server 2003, and Office SharePoint Designer 2007 now that SBS 2008 is out?

Part numbers for the SBS SA benefits media kits you need from my earlier post

Thanks Eric!

5W/50 Webcast covering migrations to SBS 2008

steveb — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 20:35:00 GMT

Jeff Middleton, Founder of SBSmigration.com

5W/50 Webcast!

LEARN MORE: Join Jeff for the Microsoft webcast! Live today, or the recording after the event.

Presented by Jeff Middleton

Migration Concepts with SBS 2008
Microsoft Partners 5W/50 Series
January 9, 2009
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

Time Zone (GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)

Register for the Webcast:
https://training.partner.microsoft.com/plc/details.aspx?publisher=12&delivery=259602

Migration projects pose unique challenges for IT Consultants. The goal is to move a customer's server infrastructure into a new product and platform with a process that is both predictable and profitable.
Jeff Middleton will present the concepts of the Microsoft documented "join to domain" approach as well as the options with an updated for SBS 2008 Swing Migration technique. In addition to a technical review of the project path elements, join us for Jeff's insights into the planning strategy concerns on these additional points to be discussed:

* The Transition Timeline & Value Budget
* Establishing Roll-Back, Pause or Completion Goals
* What's implied in Multi-Server Deployments?
* Where is the Automation?
* Including your Value-Add of Quality & Predictability

Presenter:

Jeff Middleton - Founder of SBSmigration.com

Jeff Middleton is well recognized in Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS) community worldwide, known as a speaker, author, advisor, and technical community leader. Microsoft has awarded as an SBS-MVP each year since 1999. He's acknowledged for expertise in disaster recovery, domain migration, and a full-range of topics on the SBS and Windows platforms. Based upon 20 years of experience as an SMB consultant and system integrator, he is a consultant to the consultants who have adopted his methodology and support to address server replacement projects. Jeff's name is now synonymous with the "Swing Migration" concept he introduced by establishing SBSmigration.com in 2004 to teach and support the skills and project guides now used in over 60 countries around the world.

Jeff travels constantly as a popular speaker internationally at conferences including the Microsoft Partner Program, Tech Ed, SMBTN, ITA and SMB Nation, as well as the annual SBSmigration.com IT Pro Conference in New Orleans. Jeff has participated in person as a guest speaker to over 50 local IT Pro groups of all sizes in North America, Australia and Europe.

You may reach him through www.SBSmigration.com.

SCE issue with upgrades from SBS to EBS

steveb — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:51:00 GMT

SBS Group Policy is set to have clients check WSUS once an hour. SCE/WSUS on EBS defaults to once a day, so you'll need to remove the SBS WSUS Group Policy from your migration in order to keep the database size more manageable.

The Windows Small Business Server 2008 World Wide Community Survey is Live!

steveb — Thu, 29 May 2008 06:13:00 GMT

Kevin Beares, the Community Lead for Microsoft's Windows Server Solutions Group (WSSG) asked a few of us to pass this along. If you haven't taken the 2008 SBS community survey yet, click on over to Kevin's Blog and get crackin! Below is the link and a note from Kevin:

The Windows Small Business Server 2008 WW Community Survey is Live

This is the third year we have published an SBS WW Community Survey to the SBS Community. We have learned an amazing amount of information from the people who have taken the time to tell us what they thought. Some things we kind of knew already, but other things were not as clear before we had received the feedback.Because of the previous surveys, we have made some adjustments in our community engagement. To name a few; we really worked on putting more focus on the Official SBS Blog. Our Sustaining Engineering team runs mini betas with our MVPs before KB's and Bug Fixes are released via Windows Update. We try to get more involvement in our techbetas from our User Groups. The list does go on.To the survey, the SBS Product Team would like to hear from the Windows SBS Community again. This survey is completely anonymous. In fact, some of you may have to sign out from Live in order to take the survey. So, if you get a PAGE NOT FOUND error message, please log out of Live and click on the link to the survey again.We want to know how valuable your experience is with the community resources and information that is available to you today as a member of the Windows SBS Community. We also want to know what you think could be done to improve your Windows SBS Community Experience. Please take a couple of minutes to provide us your candid feedback via this survey and let us know what you think. SBS WW Community Survey 2008 Thanks in advance for your feedback.

Kevin Beares
Community Lead – WSSG

Can't open or save an attachment in Outlook 2003?

steveb — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 03:54:00 GMT

Client of mine uses the Fax Server in Small Business Server 2003 and has all faxes come into a "fax" user account. One of the users today was telling me how she was unable to open any of the FAX.TIF attachments anymore and has had other co-workers save them as PDF files and send them to her. Thanks to Live Search... yes, I launched Live Search, not Google, and actually found the answer, can you believe it? Miracles never cease! ;-) Before I was side tracked there by that bit of trivia, I was saying that Live Search pointed me over to the TechNet Forums, yet another amazement for me since I hang out in the newsgroups much more than MS Web forums, well at least up until now.

Check out the thread at http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1482593&SiteID=17 and you'll have the answer if you have been reveiving an error along the lines of:

"Can't create file: Right-click the folder you want to create the file in, and then click Properties on the shortcut menu to check your permissions for the folder".

The error I was getting today was "Can't create file: FAX.TIF. Right-click the folder you want to create the file in, and then click Properties on the shortcut menu to check your permissions for the folder". The forum post is dealing with PDF files so it looks like anything could be an issue. The fax.tif is interesting because this office has used the fax server with email since SBS 2000 and I have never ran across one of the users getting this error.

Here is the answer in case the forum disapears on us (not sure of what the retention rate of the MS forums are or will be - I'll ask around. In the meantime:

24 Apr 2007, 1:16 PM UTC

bmdvt90

Posts 3

Answer Re: Can't open or save a pdf attachment in outlook 2003
Was this post helpful ?

Similar to the previous post, I resolved by doing the following:

1. Open REGEDIT.EXE and go to Edit -> Find... In the Find dialog box type "OutlookSecureTempFolder" without the quotes and locate that registry key.

2. That key will contain the actual folder location, and will look like:

C:\Documents and Settings\%USER_NAME%\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\OLK#\ (where # is a random letter or number)

3. Copy the location of that folder.

4. Click on Start -> Run... and paste the folder location from step #4 then click OK.

5. Windows Explorer will open that folder. Please, delete all files present.

6. Restart Microsoft Outlook and you should be able to open your attachments.

What's even cooler, is that "Netfelix" created a batch file to remove the temp files from user's profiles who are running into this a lot. Below is what he posted: I've created a batchfile for my users that have run into this problem

del "c:\documents and settings\%username%\local settings\temporary internet files\(OLK folder name)\*.pdf" The OLK foldername can be found in the registry, as stated before, by searching for "OutlookSecureTempFolder"

This was a great way to end the day finding a great and accurate answer, seeing that there is hope after all for Live Search, and that the TechNet Forums had the answer in there while the KB articles were a bit lacking in that they kept referring to long file names.

Run update from console session! - MS07-049: Vulnerability in Virtual PC and Virtual Server that could allow privilege elevation

steveb — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 18:06:00 GMT

If you prefer to run Microsoft Updates from a TS session, then make sure you run MS07-049 from a console session per the KB 937986 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937986).

Taken from the KB:

When the update 937986 is applied on a remote machine by using Terminal Services, the update does not replace the vulnerable files if the /console option is not used. To avoid this issue, you must use the /console option as shown in this example:

mstsc /console /v:<machine name>
-Steve

Lost TS/RDP after running updates?

steveb — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 08:40:00 GMT

After experiencing Terminal Services intermittently hanging after applying Microsoft Updates I've come across one way that gets the server back up and responsive most of the time and a backup plan for when it still doesn't.

First, to cover yourself, it is a good idea to run a system state backup at minimum of the server before applying updates in case you need to get yourself out of a challenge resulting from the update. Then what I've started doing (wasn't an original idea, got it from others in the community) is creating a restart.bat file that consists of shutdown -r -f and a hard return to bounce the server. I then create a one time scheduled task and set it for about 30 minutes out from when I figure the updates should have been applied and the server restarted and back online. Most of the time a restart will "jump start" the Terminal Services and get them running if they hang. If I don't have to use it, I go into Scheduled Tasks and set the time back a day to disable it until next time. The other trick I ran across was the result of a desperate attempt to get a box back online one night as I was applying updates from my Vista Tablet PC. I've since tried this from XP Pro and it does not work, so seems to be a Vista only trick.

If TS/RDP hangs on the server, as Microsoft is beginning to admit is a problem finally, attempt to VPN from your Vista computer to the remote network using the remote domain's administrator account (I've only tried this with Windows PPTP so no idea about IPSec or edge VPN devices such as SonicWALLs but I'm guessing it would fail since the reason this is working has to be because Vista is authenticating as the remote administrative account). Once you have established the Windows PPTP VPN from your Vista box, open a command prompt by selecting off of your start menu, "right clicking" and running as administrator. Once inside the command window, type shutdown -i and drop in the name or IP address of the remote server you are wanting to get back your Terminal Services from and do a restart in the graphical interface. I have had this work all but once or twice (hence the new addition of the scheduled task restart batch file). When the server comes back online TS is normally responsive and you can head off to bed versus getting in the car and taking off to a client site in the middle of the night!

Steve

Blocked in IE7 from connecting to your desktop in Remote Web Workplace?

steveb — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 08:13:00 GMT

Virtual PC 2007 is not agreeing with the network adapters on my Vista Ultimate HP tc4400 so I'm on my wife's HP nc6320 running XP Pro while I'm doing a Swing Migration. While on here I went to connect to my desktop back at the office and was tossed into a loop in IE7 prompting me about Active X controls when attempting to connect to my computer in Remote Web Workplace. Had this happen the other day in RWW so guessing others are having similar hassles with it. Here's how to fix it.

In IE7 go to Tools, Internet Options, Security (2nd tab), Trusted sites, and add your SBS external domain to your Trusted sites. Then click on the Custom level... button about 1/3rd up from the bottom of the Security Window and scroll down to "Download unsigned ActiveX controls" and change the radio button from Disable to Prompt. Click OK and you should be set. If you would like or need to install the Self-Signed SSL Certificate your SBS box created while you are at it so you don't have to look at the colorful red across your address bar in IE, check out the SBS Team Blog's post by Wayne McIntyre to take care of that why you're at it.

Steve

Exclude your ISA log files from AV scans

steveb — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 22:05:00 GMT

This isn't in the normal KB articles for antivirus scanning exclusions, so if you come across the following event ID, check out MS KB 887311.

Event Type: ErrorEvent Source: Microsoft ISA Server ControlEvent Category: None

Event ID: 14079

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;887311

Support for SBS 2003 without Service Packs ending soon!

steveb — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 23:08:00 GMT

Microsoft will officially end support for SBS 2003 RTM (also know as SBS 2003 SP0) on July 10, 2007. See the SBS Blog for the full story at http://blogs.technet.com/sbs/archive/2007/07/03/sbs-2003-sp-0-support-retirement.aspx.

Steve