KDB Systems

I’m leaving for New Orleans tomorrow to participate in the IT Pro 2010 Conference. This’ll be my first time at this conference. It’s run by SBSMigration.com. It’s a somewhat unique conference in that there will be very few presentations. It’s mostly panel discussions and workshops. I’m helping Mitch Garvis run a workshop on “Desktop Deployment and Management Tools” and participating on a panel about “Will the Cloud Break or Fix Your Business Model?” The latter should be interesting. The panel includes people who’ve “gone all in” on cloud computing and others who think it’s the latest overhyped “next big thing”. I’m somewhere in the middle. I’m excited to be working with Mitch, although I’m nervous about it as well. Mitch is the expert on Windows 7 deployment. I’m just a beginner compared to him. It should be a fun time in New Orleans.

Oh yeah, almost forgot. I’m getting married in New Orleans after the conference. And no Dee I didn’t forget. I was joking about that. I’m so excited about the marriage that it’s hard to remember I have actual work to do while in New Orleans. Great conference, a chance to meet up with some old friends, take in some great jazz, and then get married, what could be better than that?

The current IT buzzword is “cloud”. Most small business owners don’t know what this means and they don’t care. To them it’s just another word for Internet. They already use the Internet so selling them more Internet is a hard sell. Personally at this point in time I mostly agree with them. They don’t need more Internet and that’s all most of the current cloud offerings are, piecemeal offerings that don’t add much value but cost more than what they already use. What they need is a managed Internet service that they can afford. All the current cloud offerings that I’ve seen are too limited or too specific in what they offer, e.g. email, computer management of some sort, backup, etc. Someone needs to offer an all encompassing Internet service that includes email, computer and security management, backup, domain hosting, web site hosting, in other words – their Internet and more. This needs to be inexpensive to set up. Less than $1,000 to pay someone to do it for them would work. It needs to be inexpensive on an ongoing basis. $10 per PC per month would be good. This I could sell. The current setup of overpriced piecemeal solutions I can’t. I don’t even care if I get a cut of the $10 per month. I’d actually rather not. It would be too much paper work. I don’t want to brand this with my name. I want to sell it as I do with any other piece of technology. If it’s not working I don’t want the customer to blame me. I want to phone up the vendor, get it working, and get paid for my time to do this. I want the ongoing business of maintaining their network infrastructure, dealing with the problems the cloud management finds with their PCs, advising them on new products or upgrades, etc.

The other cloud thing that would work in a very big way for small businesses is line of business (LOB) applications. These are a real pain point for most small businesses. They usually need a dedicated server. They’re usually hard to backup properly. They are a major pain to upgrade. Whenever you call for support invariably it’s your network, software, or hardware that’s at fault not the vendor’s application. If all the small business user had to do was point their browser to the app and logon they would be in LOB app heaven. They pay many thousands of dollars yearly for the current terrible support. They would gladly pay for this. The only problem would be a prolonged Internet outage. Some LOB apps that control local equipment wouldn’t work. I can think of many cases where it wouldn’t work but when it did it would be the best thing to happen for a small business since spreadsheets were invented. I’m pretty sure the vendors would love it as well. It would mean far less support problems for them.

Installing Exchange 2010 Client Access Role

I decided to bite the bullet and not worry about not being able to install Exchange 2007 after Exchange 2010 is installed. I’ve got good backups for my SBS 2003 server so it’s time to start. I’m going to start slow. I’m just installing the Client Access Role today. First I have to prepare the server. I went to the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant site, answered a few questions then downloaded a PDF file with basic instructions on how to proceed. I read over the Exchange stuff on TechNet once again just to be sure I hadn’t missed anything. I found a great site with a very quick guide to installing all the prerequisites. Thank you PowerShell and netometer.com. A quick check once again on the health of Active Directory and I was ready to go. I can’t stress enough that when installing any version of Exchange you need a healthy Active Directory. Next up was updating the Schema, Active Directory, and the domain. This all appeared to work without a hitch. I waited for the changes to replicate then ran the Exchange setup and picked the Client Access Role. It installed just fine. I exited the installation and checked the installation logs, event logs, and fired up the Exchange Management Console. Everything looked great. One tip I’d like to pass along is don’t install Exchange from the distribution media. Copy the media to a folder on the server you’re installing Exchange on. You can then copy any Exchange Rollups into the Update folder and they’ll get installed during the Exchange installation.

The next step involves installing a certificate. I haven’t decided if I’m going to use my own certificate or purchase one. I’m leaning towards the public cert. In any case I’ve got to get back to work that pays so I’m going to take a break here.

The next morning my daily report from the SBS 2003 server contained a surprise. There were over 2,000 errors in the Directory Service event log. The error was:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: NTDS General
Event Category: DS Schema
Event ID: 1136
Date: 4/6/2010
Time: 10:03:44 AM
User: NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON
Computer: SBS-SERVER
Description: Active Directory failed to create an index for the following attribute.
Attribute identifier: 2515870862
Attribute name: msExchObjectID
A schema cache update will occur 5 minutes after the logging of this event and will attempt to create an index for the attribute.
Additional Data
Error value: -1403 JET_errIndexDuplicate, Index is already defined

There were several AD attributes with this error every five minutes. A quick Google/Bing found the problem had to do with the regional settings. Both servers were set to the Canada region, Canadian English, and a US keyboard. That’s pretty much how I always set up Windows. Apparently this combination, and many others, can cause problems with AD updates. I reset everything to US, rebooted and the errors continued. Further searching found a needed registry change. I found it on the Microsoft support forums here. The value for US English is 0×409 Hex by the way. It took a while to find that as well. After another reboot all the errors stopped. I’m sure I could have figured out how to use Canadian English but I don’t really care. Setting everything in the domain to US regional settings actually makes many things work better. Lots of applications just assume US settings. Date sorts and displays are often borked up if you use anything other than US settings so I’m just going to live with Windows thinking I’m in the US J

SBS 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 Migration (Part 1)
SBS 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 Migration (Part 2)
SBS 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 Migration (Part 3)
SBS 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 Migration (Part 4)
SBS 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 Migration (Part 5) Coming soon