KDB Systems

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 0x409 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

Prepar­ing to move DHCP

As part of the project I have to move the DHCP server from the SBS server to a new server. With Win­dows Server 2008 R2 Enter­prise you get what is called one plus four licens­ing. You can install it on phys­i­cal hard­ware. That’s the one license. If this instal­la­tion is only used as a Hyper-V par­ent you can then install four child par­ti­tions with the same license. So far I’ve used two of these licenses, one for the domain con­troller and one for the future Exchange server. I want to run a Ter­mi­nal Server for the third license. This leaves me with one spare license. I plan to exper­i­ment with Direct Access so I’ll prob­a­bly need the last license for that. Long story short, DHCP would have to go on one of the exist­ing servers. I decided to put it on the domain con­troller. Dur­ing the changeover I’ll be run­ning DHCP on the SBS server and the new domain con­troller. The rea­son for this is one or the other may be down for a while when mak­ing changes. This isn’t nor­mally a big deal as long as none of the exist­ing leases expire or no new com­put­ers get con­nected to the net­work. My prob­lem is I have many dif­fer­ent com­put­ers com­ing and going. I may have cus­tomer com­put­ers I’m work­ing on that would need a new lease. This means two DHCP servers. I installed The DHCP server role on the new domain con­troller, con­fig­ured both the exist­ing DHCP on the SBS server and the new DHCP with the same scope but dif­fer­ent exclu­sions so they wouldn’t be try­ing to give out the same addresses. Once fin­ished I autho­rised the new DHCP server in Active Direc­tory and logged off. The next morn­ing there was a sur­prise wait­ing for me in the daily SBS report. One ser­vice was not run­ning. I logged on to the SBS server and saw that DHCP was not run­ning. I’d for­got­ten one of SBS’s quirks. If another DHCP server is run­ning it will shut down its own DHCP server. A quick Bing/Google search found the reg­istry change and all was well with DHCP run­ning on both servers. One more check­point done on the migra­tion from SBS 2003 to Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010.

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)