sbs2008 – Absoblogginlutely!

I always knew you had 21 days to finish a migration for an SBS installation, but I always thought the countdown was triggered when you ran dcpromo on the second server, breaking the original license agreement by having two SBS servers on the network that both want to have all the roles. (On a side note it is interesting that Microsoft provide a tool to get around Windows licensing but if you attempt to run other third party applications to do the same thing it gets flagged as a virus or you fall foul of Windows Genuine Advantage)…

Apparently, running the initial SBS pre migration assistant starts the 21 day timer even if you don’t continue with the rest of the installation. Attempting to install SBS after 21 days will provide an error message stating “Source Server does not meet minimum requirements for migration” as per the screenshot below.

If this screen appears, pressing Shift F10 will open a command prompt, at which point the sbssetup log file can be read with

notepad "C:\Program Files\Windows Small Business Server\Logs\SBSSetup.log"

Towards the end of the log file will be the reason the migration stopped. In this case it was to do with the HKLM\ Software\ Microsoft\ SmallBusinessServer\ Migration\ MigrationReady containing an old date and LastCheckTime (value of 1) being set to a long time ago.

I’m not sure whether hacking these values out would allow you to continue on with the install but I’m going to rerun the migration wizard again. Unfortunately this requires another (pointless) reboot of the source server – something I am trying to avoid when setting this up in a parallel installation.

exchange2007 SBS Work

Exchange 2007 services fail to start on DC (SBS server)

By Andy on Wednesday, February 23, 2011

I’ve had an issue with a new SBS2008 server, running Exchange service pack3 rollup 2 where the information store service does not start after a reboot, especially annoying after the server is rebooting with a scheduled maintenance task. Apparently this issue was fixed in service pack 1, roll up 5 but I’m still getting it 2 service packs and 2 rollups later.

Microsoft have a “fast publish” knowledge base article 940845 and the first solution is to start the services manually – really helpful! Thankfully there are other solutions that involve changing the dependencies of the services to ensure Exchange does not try to start before AD has finished.

One word of warning – using the Microsoft KB to determine the latest service pack or rollup for Exchange 2007 returns Service Pack 3, rollup 1 from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937052. However Rollup 2 has been available since Dec 14th 2010. I’ve put a note on the original kb article but the better way to determine the latest rollup is probably to search for Exchange 2007 service pack 3 rollup

Update Knowledge base 940845 now has a fixit file you can download that will change the dependencies for you along with instructions on how to fix it manually. The article no longer has references to this issue being fixed in previous rollups – probably because this was obviously not the case.

Exams Microsoft SBS Windows 2008 Work

Small Business Specialist certification upgraded to 2008

By Andy on Sunday, April 25, 2010

I finally got around to taking 70-653 on Friday and passing it. It was an interesting experience as I had to take a survey before the exam that asked questions about my experience with the product and what I thought were my strengths and weaknesses. If I didn’t know the exams were downloaded overnight, it would make me very suspicious – if I answered that I didn’t know remote access very well, would I get lots of questions on vpn configuration or would Microsoft be kind and avoid that area? Although I passed it would have been nice to also get a comparison with my answers from the survey and my final test results. Funnily enough my weakest area was user management – I’m pretty sure that is because I’m so used to doing things in AD and I know to do things with the wizard but I don’t pay attention to EXACTLY what the wizard is called.
Now that I’ve passed I’ve got another Technical Specialist under my belt and this should also upgrade my SBSC to 2008 status (although the SBSC doesn’t appear on Microsoft transcripts as this certification is “awarded to companies rather than individuals” (which I think is a big mistake on Microsoft’s part))

exchange2007 Microsoft

Could not open key UNKNOWN\Components – fixed

By Andy on Saturday, April 10, 2010

When attempting to install Exchange 2007 sp2 on a server I was getting the error message Could not open Key UNKNOWN\Components\ 32 hex numbers \ another 32 hex numbers (see below)

This turned out to be occurring when the Rollup 9 package was being uninstalled. Checking into the registry and hklm \software \ microsoft \ windows \ CurrentVersion \ Installer \ UserData \ S-1-5-18 \ Components \ numbers \ numbers. Taking ownership of the parent registry key and then assigning my admin user full rights to the parent and cascading permissions would allow the procedure to continue a little bit further. Eventually after a couple of attempts I expanded the Components key in regedit using ctrl + and then used the arrow key to move all the way through, fixing permissions as required. The lazy way would have been to set permissions at the Components Key but that may cause other problems I didn’t really want to deal with in the future.

I have no idea why the permissions were so screwed up but I really do not appreciate wasting 4 hours on a Saturday afternoon trying to fix the issue – it took a while to debug the initial errors and then more time to run the install, find out it kept causing errors with different registry locations and then navigate through the entire component tree.

Bugs Hotfixes Microsoft Remote desktop control Windows Update Windows XP windows7 Work

Unable to rdp to Windows2008 SBS server from XP client after KB969084 installed

By Andy on Wednesday, December 23, 2009

We had an issue when all of a sudden we were not able to remote desktop to a clients SBS 2008 server using the rdp client and the TSGateway functionality. Remote Web Workplace would work fine and so would Windows7 clients.
After proving this patch was the culprit by removing the patch and finding my saved rdp session would work, I went back and read the kbarticle 969084 on this patch. I hadn’t initially read this (in common with a lot of other people) and also because the patch was pushed down via wsus. It turns out that XP does not turn on CredSSP by default and this is needed to work with the new RDP client. I followed the instructions at kb951608 and after a reboot, going to the control box/About I got the message that Network Level Authentication was supported and I was then able to connect succesfully.

To summarize you need todo the following.

Click Start , click Run , type regedit , and then press ENTER.
In the navigation pane, locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
In the details pane, right-click Security Packages , and then click Modify .
In the Value data box, type tspkg . Leave any data that is specific to other SSPs, and then click OK .
In the navigation pane, locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders
In the details pane, right-click SecurityProviders, and then click Modify .
In the Value data box, type credssp.dll . Leave any data that is specific to other SSPs, and then click OK .
Exit Registry Editor.
Restart the computer.

Tag Archives: sbs2008

SBS server migration has to be run within 21 days from the day you initially run the wizard

Exchange 2007 services fail to start on DC (SBS server)

Small Business Specialist certification upgraded to 2008

Could not open key UNKNOWN\Components – fixed

Unable to rdp to Windows2008 SBS server from XP client after KB969084 installed