Lessons Learned

SBS 2003 Unleashed

2005-12-28T07:51:33-06:00

I’ve been a little out of pocket this week with the holidays and family in from out of town, but I went through several mailing lists this morning and saw several messages asking for clarifications about the Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 Unleashed book. In this post, I’ll briefly discuss some of the structure and thought processes behind the book, which will hopefully address most of the questions that have been asked.

In Stores Now

2005-12-20T05:45:07-06:00

Those of you who have been waiting with baited breath can start brushing your teeth. The first shipments of Micorosoft Small Business Server 2003 Unleashed have started arriving at bookstores around the US. We're hoping for wide physical distribution to brick and mortar locations by the end of the month. Those who preordered copies directly from Sams Publishing should start receiving those copies ay day now. Those who preordered from other online resellers should see them arrive by the first of the year.

Thanks again to everyone who helped put this book together. And thanks also to the thousands of you who preordered copies through the various online resellers. I trust you will find the book well worth your investment and the wait.

Another reason not to completely disable SMB Signing on a server through GP

2005-12-14T05:09:35-06:00

I have a post on this blog about creating a special GPO on SBS to disable SMB signing so that Macintosh workstations can access server shares. In that post, I present a solution that is contrary to what other folks in the community have suggested for a solution:

Telnet is your Friend

2005-12-05T13:20:41-06:00

Sometimes the best troubleshooting tools are the simple ones. One of my personal favorites is Telnet. Here are just a few quick troubleshooting tasks that I routinely encounter for which Telnet is the first tool out of the box:

Automounting SBS Shares on a Macintosh

2005-11-27T06:46:43-06:00

Anyone who has used a Macintosh in a network environment for several years will remember a feature from OS 9 and earlier versions that allowed you to save logon credentials for a network volume. This would allow users to have those network volumes automatically mount on the Mac desktop when the user logged in on the Mac. As with many other features of the new operating system, this functionality changed with the release of OS X. As a result, there is no longer a simple checkbox that a user can enable to have a network volume automatically mount when the user logs in.

There are several ways to recover this functionality, however. This document details one of the simpler methods. Given the intended audience for this document, there are several assumptions being made.

The Macintosh is running Mac OS 10.4 or later.
The server providing the network volumes is running SBS 2003.
The Macintosh is accessing shares on the SBS server through SMB, not AppleTalk.

Safari and Companyweb

2005-11-26T05:01:25-06:00

I've been assisting a client of mine in California with getting a number of Macs connected to a new SBS 2003 server for one of his installations. We have been able to get most of the issues resolved, but he hit me with one recently that I couldn't nail down immediately. One of the newer Macs could not load http://companyweb from Safari.

At the time of his request, I was off site, and as a quick check, I made a VPN connection to another client site from my PowerBook and attempted to load companyweb from that site in Safari. I couldn't make an immediate connection, which I wrote off as DNS. However, I did try to connect using the SSL interface to companyweb: https://servername:444/ which connected immediately. I was prompted for a username and password (understandable since the Mac does not have Windows authorization credentials cached) and got in to browse through all of the pieces of companyweb.

I reported this back to my client, but wanted to do a full examination in my test network. Here's what I found...

Another reason NOT to use a public DNS name as your internal domain namespace

2005-11-12T07:11:05-06:00

I was called in to work with a client this week who was having some trouble with employees who were connecting to the network via VPN. The basic problem was this: when the employees made a VPN connection and tried to load the companyweb web site, they got directed to someplace else altogether. When they tried to connect to companyweb from machines on the internal network, no problems.

The core problem boiled down to the internal domain name space. It was the same as their public DNS name. I.e., their internal domain was smallbizco.net (not their real domain) and their public domain was smallbizco.net.

I was able to give them a workaround ( use the URL https://SBSserverIPaddress:444/ ) since they couldn't implement the real solution, which is to rename the internal domain with a private, non-routable namespace (such as smallbizco.local or smallbizco.lan).

Every SBS consultant worth his or her salt will tell you that you never, EVER use a public domain name for your internal domain name. DNS lookup failures, like the ones experienced here, are the reason why. And had this client set up the internal domain name correctly, they could have avoided this problem.

However, the real reason WHY it was failing was because of what I now believe is a flaw in the way Windows handles VPN connections, not only because they used a public DNS namespace for their internal domain. What follows is how I determined that the problem lies with Windows and not solely with the client.

Internet Access for Macintoshes behind ISA 2004

2005-11-05T15:52:11-06:00

Since the Macintosh platform does not interact with the default authentication requirements of ISA 2004 for web and non-web access, you have to create a special ISA configuration to allow outbound Internet access for Macs.

The remainder of this post will give step-by-step instructions for setting up the ISA configuration.

Not getting your Sharepoint Alerts?

2005-11-05T15:20:31-06:00

I was working with another SBS consultant on an issue where the majority of his client sites were not receiving alerts from Sharepoint, not even the e-mail messages identifying that an alert had been created.

In a reversal of my usual approach, I'll give you the solution, then tell you how we approached the troubleshooting.

Turns out that, based on a message from SBS MVP Les Connor that's posted on SBS MVP Kevin Weilbacher's site, my client had enabled the Filter Messages with Blank Sender in the Exchange System Manager Message Delivery section. Once we disabled that setting, the Sharepoint alerts started flowing as expected.

Alternately, you can set a From address in the Sharepoint Central Administration settings. From Administrative Tools, open Sharepoint Central Administration. Then go to Configure Virtual Server Settings, Companyweb, Virtual Server E-mail Settings, and enter a valid address in the From Address: field.

Configuring DHCP Reservations in SBS 2003

2005-11-04T15:31:56-06:00

While the default SBS install creates a stable DHCP server configuration (when DHCP is enabled on the SBS server, and it should be), sometimes there are reasons to have a network device receive a consistent IP address on the internal network. This could be a network-aware printer that needs a fixed IP or if you need to group a set of workstations in a specific IP address range for ISA. This post covers the steps to follow to create a DHCP reservation on an SBS 2003 server.

Mac Office 2004 11.2.1 Update Released

2005-10-21T23:07:17-06:00

Microsoft Office 2004 AutoUpdate ran this morning and caught the Office 11.2.1 update, which was released yesterday. This update is primarily an Entourage update, but given my proclivity to work with Entourage in an SBS environment, so I dug right into it.

The Entourage update relates to potential issues with synchronization to an Exchange server introduced in the SP2 update for Office 2004.

So far, I have not noticed any performance issues after installing the 11.2.1 update, but then I didn't notice any negative issues with the SP2 update. In fact, I found that my performance with all the Office apps increased significantly, especially when launching the apps.

My recommendation: go ahead and install this update. If you haven't installed the SP2 update for Office 2004, you need to get that installed as well.

Publishing Timbuktu through ISA 2004

2005-10-07T04:51:36-06:00

I've been asked a couple of times now about publishing Timbuktu through ISA 2004. More than once is enough for me to post it here.

Follow these steps to publish Timbuktu to an internal client through ISA 2004 (note that this will only provide access to one internal computer for Timbuktu, not every system that is running Timbuktu on the internal network):

Mac Office 2004 SP2

2005-09-24T08:04:02-06:00

This past week, Microsoft released Service Pack 2 for Office 2004 for the Mac. Among the enhancements are significant improvements in the Entourage mail client. Some of these improvements are available after installing KB 888619 on Exchange 2003 or 892896 on Exchange 2000.

Improvements provided in Office 2004 SP2 include:

Creating Read/Write Mac Shares on a Windows Server

2005-09-17T11:22:46-06:00

By default, when you creat a new Mac volume on a Windows Server using the Services For Macintosh GUI interface, the new share gets created with Read-Only permissions for all Mac users. In order to allow Mac users to be able to modify the contents of the volume, you have to go back and manually change remove the "Read Only" checkbox from the settings on the share.

I just stumbled across the command line that can be used to create the Mac share and make it Read/Write from the get-go:

volname

dirpath

where volname is the name you want the users to see when they access the volume and dirpath is the full path to the folder on the server that should be used as the root of the share.

Because I'm lazy and don't like typing in full pathnames, I created the following batch file to create a new Macintosh volume share using teh current working directory as the root of the volume:

Allocated Memory Alerts Redux

2005-09-14T06:44:32-06:00

If you haven't checked out Susan's post on Allocated Memory Alerts, you absolutely should. I did. A long time ago. But I wasn't too concerned because I didn't have too many sites running SQL and ISA on the SBS box. And the one that I did have wasn't generating the Allocated Memory Alerts, so I filed this away under the "might need to know later" file.

Good thing I did. Here's what happened: