SBS

Vista and SBS2003 (in)compatability

One (new) client has unfortunately a Vista desktop purchased a couple of days before we took over IT and it needed joining to the domain. This has proved a difficult task to say the least. Our remote control software stops showing the users screen whenever the UAC prompt pops up (and freezes our screen until the local user clicks ok) which means the end user has to remain at their desk when we are doing any troubleshooting rather than letting them use another computer to do some work.
Anyway, the server/connectcomputer wizard was complaining that I needed admin rights (which I had already) and a patch is available, KB926505 but when I try to install that on the server I get the very wonderful error message “Failed to install” with no details as to why. Nothing in the eventlogs either. Add/Remove Programs now says the patch is installed and when you try to remove it, I get a message about all sorts of programs failing to work and the end of the world so I’ve left it in place until I get a chance to remove and reinstall the server whilst I am on site as opposed to RWW’ing into the server. In the meantime I joined the computer to the domain manually, and I’ve had to change the logon script so it doesn’t UAC whenever the script does the sbs setup program. Apparently this is fixed with the patch, so the patch obviously doesn’t work – watch this space.

Unable to continue setup on SBS when doing a swing migration

I’m in the middle of a Swing Migration and received the message “”this server has a trust relationship with domain.local” after continuing the standard setup (after I’ve done most of the hard work migrating the existing settings). It took me a while to hunt down, but this is solved by editing a registry value and rebooting as per the details on Jared Griego’s sbs blog and at event id. I’m posting the details in the extended entry for safe keeping. Not sure why it happened, I guess there was a stage missed in editing AD or dns, but it all looked ok after double and triple checking.

Mobile Admin for sbs2003

One of our users lost their mobile phone in the snow and I needed to initiate remote wipe of the device. I downloaded and installed the MobileAdmin pack but whenever I went into the Wipe page I would get a 403 error as below

he remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden.

Source Error:

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.

Stack Trace:

[WebException: The remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden.]
System.Net.HttpWebRequest.CheckFinalStatus() +680
System.Net.HttpWebRequest.EndGetRequestStream(IAsyncResult asyncResult) +74
System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetRequestStream() +234
Microsoft.Exchange.AirSync.Admin.Mailbox.propFindRequest(String deviceUri) +240
Microsoft.Exchange.AirSync.Admin.Mailbox.getDevices() +194
Microsoft.Exchange.AirSync.Admin.Devices.refreshDevicesTable() +135
Microsoft.Exchange.AirSync.Admin.Devices.Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) +190
System.Web.UI.Control.OnLoad(EventArgs e) +67
System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() +35
System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain() +750

The advice at Experts Exchange mentioned that you need to remove require ssl to the exadmin directory in sbs, a fact backed up at Vladville. Shortly afterwards the phone was wiped.

Low Disk Space HarddiskVolumeX in SBS

If you get an alert from Small Business Server stating :The following disk is low on free disk space. ……Drive letter: HarddiskVolume17″ (in my case) this is typically caused by a usb drive being unplugged without going through safe removal. The alert will get sent every day until the server is rebooted. You can also reduce the chance of this happening again by optimizing the drive for quick removal as per this post on Experts Exchange

OS Packaging

It was interesting to see that details about the packaging for Windows Vista was released today – JCXP links to MS Tech today which has a picture of the neat dvd box. Contrast this to the cd’s that I received from Dell for the SBS 2003r2 server I opened. Not only was the media on CD (which means a painful 4 cd install after Dell’s install creates a small 25gb boot partition) despite the server having a dvd drive, but the cd’s were in the paper sleeve envelopes that you normally get with an OS installation from Dell. What was worse that disks 1 and 2 were in the same envelope with a piece of paper slid between them, the same for disk 3 and 4. This is really cheap, likely to lead to scratches and not a good first start impression of a brand new server!
(Note that I don’t know if SBS was requested on cd instead of dvd or whether that is how it comes but even if it was ordered on cd, it could at least come in a reliable case.