If you haven’t already got IE8 installed, it’s well worth it, with tabbed browsing and all the like. With Accelerators that quickly jump you to a map or a translation, you can browse a lot faster.
If you aren’t running Windows 7 yet, you can get it from here. If you are, you’ll have to wait for a new Beta build of Windows 7.
Looks like another worm has poked it’s nasty head above water, time to double check and make sure your Anti-viruses are up to date. The Worm jumps from PCs to PCs on the local network by brute force guessing passwords, installing an HTTP server and download malware onto the system. I mean really, don’t these computer “geniuses” (also known as hackers) have anything better to do with their time. Imagine if they wrote productive software!
DailyTech.com has an article that you can learn about it’s infection of 8 Million Business PCs in 1 week. But what you really need to know, is that Microsoft has released a patch for this already, and a security bulletin. Ideally, you should make sure that MS08-67 is installed to prevent a Vulnerability in a service to allow remote code execution.
Get your worm shot.
Folks, as you saw over on the Official SBS Blog, the Update Roll-up 1 Released today!
This update has a few things included with it. First, the security tab incorrectly displayed the spyware/malware status of clients with Vista SP1. This is largely due to an API change that happened, and depending on the 3rd party solution you’re using for this, you may or may not have gotten correct status. Now it should be fixed 100% of the time! The second issue is not a security issue. It’s when the Internet Address Management Wizard unexpectedly exists. The problem here was a race condition when setting up the server for browsing to domain name providers website.
The update will be available on Microsoft Update, most likely starting tomorrow, if not, shortly there after. It’s also noted as KB 958715.
Huge thanks to the SBS Sustained Engineering team for pushing this one through
Last night we discovered that SBS 2008 win’s Technology of the year from InfoWorld as far as platforms go.
You can read about it on InfoWorld’s Award Website.
Once you make the jump to SBS 2008, you’ll wonder if those old .BAK files from NTBackup can be read. I mean what if you want to recover some files from your 2003 backups to your 2008 server?
Never fear, the Windows NTBackup Restore Utility is here! Yes it works for Small Business Server.
Brief Description
Utility for restoring backups made on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 to computers running Windows Vista and Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008.
Looks like the public beta for Windows 7 has finally arrived, announced at CES yesterday. The Windows 7 Public beta should be available for download tomorrow from the Windows 7 product page.
If you’re more into servers, like me, you’ll be happy to know that the Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta is here. The 2008 R2 server product page is here.
In today’s global economy, tied together with the pressure to stay green, what are the options for a paperless, more efficient, green office? Is using technology greener that not using technology? Sure each server or client PC you run increases your carbon footprint, at least according to an article on MSN called Green My Blog. But also mentioned here is that using hosted services means you share that carbon footprint with the 1,000’s or 10,000’s of others using those servers.
For the past 4 years now, I have been on a mission to reduce the amount of paper that I use, and conserve as much as I can. I am doing this at home, and at the office. Going green at the office is not only good for the environment, but it will save the business a lot of money! This doesn’t just stop with paper, it rolls into saving money on power, and making employees more effective, saving you on payroll! In fact, the CBS Early Show talks about saving money with green technology by cutting down on your power consumption, paper consumption and making employees more effective:
[This post courtesy of efforts by Matt Clapham and Adam DePue]
First of all, Happy 2009! I trust the holiday season was fun for everyone. It certainly was for Matt who finally got his XBox 360 working with his Media Center and SBS 2008 server at his house over the holiday’s. We wanted to share his experiences to benefit the community. While Windows Home Server is designed for this scenario, and no work-arounds are required, Small Business Server doesn’t expect a media center or XBox in a work environment.
None the less, it will work should you choose to either run SBS 2008 in your home, or have a Media Center or XBox in the office.
Step 1: Ensuring the XBox 360 Extender can connect to the Media Center PC
To ensure that the XBox 360 can extend media from the media center edition for content *on* the media center itself, you need the media center to be classified as a server on the network. To do this the media center must be located in the Server’s OU within the Active Directory. This changes the group policies that apply to that machine, allowing the XBox to connect to the Media Center PC. To make this change:
At this point, your XBox extender should be able to access the media center, and play content from the Media Center PC. This work around was also discussed on The Green Button.
Enabling the XBox 360 Extender to access content on the SBS 2008 server
Due to the fact that the XBox extender software creates new accounts on the media center (“MCX”), these accounts do not have access to the SBS 2008 server. As a result, the XBox will fail to access content stored on the server. While you could create these accounts in the domain, there is no hope to make the passwords match, because the MCX password is a randomly generated long password known only to the XBox and and the Media Center. Instead, you have to create a logon script for these MCX accounts to map drives to the SBS server using a domain user account which has access to the content you want to access from the XBox.
To create the logon script for the MCX account, you’ll want to create a batch file with the following contents:
net use * /d /y
net use x: \\SBS\Shared_Videos /user:SBS-Domain\AccountA "Password"
Where “SBS” is the server name, “Shared_Videos” is an example share name, “SBS-Domain” is your SBS domain name, “AccountA” is the domian user account name and “Password” is the password for AccountA. Once you’ve created this script, you need to edit the user account on the Media Center to tell it to run that script on logon. The script would of course add the “net use” line multiple times for different shares you want to connect to. For more detailed steps, see my previous post on this issue.
Nicholas King and David Fabritius have gotten together to give you a post on what’s different between the MAPS (Microsoft Action Pack Subscription) kit and the Retail kit.
You can view it over on Nicholas King’s Blog.
When you receive your MAPS media you’ll get the following;
Here’s the catch – In MAPS you wont get the media that is branded SBS Premium. Why did we do this you might ask? Well in fact we have three reasons.
How does this differ from setting this up with the branded media? If you’re deploying in an SBS target network with less than 75 users then there is no difference.
For those of you who don’t know, the new Live Home page has re-launched with a new version at http://home.live.com. Looks more functional, with feeds, profiles, and the ability to link your websites together, including Flixter, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc.
Definately worth checking out, it also includes a new version of SkyDrive, which appears to now offer 25GB of space, instead of 5GB. What do you think?
On November 18th, OneCare made an announcement regarding a change in the OneCare Service. I wanted to alert you that the Small Business Server Q&A on my original post had been updated. I will repost the Q&A here for you RSS feeders:
Q: How does this impact Windows Small Business Server 2008 (part of the Windows Essentials Server Solutions offerings) and Windows Live OneCare for Server?
A: Microsoft will continue to support the 120 day trial for Windows Live OneCare for Server offered in SBS 2008. The subscription service will be available for purchase through June 30, 2009. Microsoft will ensure Windows Live OneCare for Server subscribers will remain protected for the duration of their trials and subscriptions. For language and market availability please see http://www.microsoft.com/sbs/en/us/editions-overview.aspx.
Q. Didn’t you announce at the Windows Small Business Server 2008 beta that Windows Live OneCare for Server would be offered as a trial on SBS 2008?
A. Yes we did and in some cases the new Windows Small Business Server 2008 will ship with a Windows Live OneCare for Server trial (please see http://www.microsoft.com/sbs/en/us/editions-overview.aspx for language and market availability). This announcement does not affect the trial at this time. Microsoft will continue to support the 120 day trial for Windows Live OneCare for Server currently offered in SBS 2008. The subscription service will be available for purchase through June 30, 2009. Microsoft will ensure Windows Live OneCare for Server subscribers will remain protected for the duration of their trials and subscriptions.
Our Customer Support organization has a great post out on How to Setup Anti-Spam in Exchange 2007 When Using a Mail Hosting Company. They key to note here is that if you are using one of our DNS partners and have left the Dynamic DNS client on, there is a registry change you have to do in order to not have to update your DNS records after the Dynamic DNS client updates them again.
If you’re using a 3rd party anti-spam service (which totally frees up your bandwidth for more useful traffic), I highly recommend reading this post.
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