Yeah! the Official SBS Blog has an outstanding blog post on how to add 32-bit Print drivers to that 64-bit Operating System known as Small Business Server.
Check it out here.
Windows 7 has been getting some good press. I won’t lie. I definitely like it. I’ve upgraded 3 of my 4 primary working machines from Vista to Windows 7 Beta. Two of those three machines are super powerful 4gb of RAM machines that ran Vista really, really fast. They are even faster with Windows 7, and a clean install (I haven’t tried an upgrade yet) has all of the drivers detected, and there was very little thought on installing it.
The 3rd machine that I installed Windows 7 on was actually a NetBook. One of those new fancy machines that is ultra portable, designed for running a browser and not much else. I have the Acer Aspire One, It ships with Windows XP Home edition installed on it. I have to say when I first booted it up, I was thinking “Wow! I forgot how old Windows XP was!”. Anyways, I backed it up via my HP Media Smart Server, attached a USB DVD drive with Win7 Beta in it, and hit GO! It’s Blaaaaazing fast, and has all the drivers (minus the Wi-Fi driver) detected out of the box. The good news is the Wi-Fi Driver is a known issue that should be fixed before RTM. The other good news is installing the XP driver seems to work perfectly fine, and hey, it’s a beta anyways right?
Ok, so now for the part where I tell you my few favorite features, that drive me NUTS when they aren’t there on my last remaining Vista box:
I can’t wait to see what they do after the Beta! And don’t forget, if you’re trying out the Beta, and you run out of time you can extend it a little bit, yes it works with Win7 too!
Many providers offer inexpensive SSL certificates for domain-only validation. GoDaddy seems to be a popular choice given just how inexpensive the certificates are. GoDaddy’s inexpensive cert is called Standard SSL certificate.
Before we dive in, let’s recap the certificate story in Windows Small Business Server 2008. There are two "types” of certificates and four “states” your certificate can be in. Those are defined on TechNet in the Managing Certificates section of the SBS documentation. The two types are “Self-Issued” or “Trusted”, and by default, SBS 2008 ships using a self-issued certificate infrastructure, which is used to authenticate the server to the client, and encrypt the traffic between the remote client and the server. The obvious downside here is there is extra work with the certificate installer package on your remote/non-domain joined clients, and Windows Mobile devices. At some point there are enough of these to warrant the low cost to upgrade to a 3rd party Trusted certificate. With a 3rd party trusted certificate, the client computers and mobile devices already trust the root of the 3rd party certificate, as these are maintained by Microsoft Update (and various other solutions for non-Microsoft based clients/devices).
As you probably read when you learned about the Internet Address Management Wizard, we have a number of domain name providers, eNomCentral, GoDaddy, and Register.com. All three of these providers are very well equipped to sell you and facilitate installing a trusted certificate for your small business network, so feel free to shop around!
I’ll be going through the steps for GoDaddy today as they are the only provider that requires intermediate certificates, which is a bit more challenging. The process is the same for all the providers, except for eNomCentral and Register.com, you can skip the intermediate certificate steps, and naturally the UI would be different. On a final note, I have not had luck with the GoDaddy certificate and Windows Mobile 5 (Update Below), if you have Windows Mobile 5 devices, you may want to consider one of the other partners, but the best thing to do here is open the certificate store on your WM5 device and validate the root cert for the provider you’re going with is available in the certificate store.
While Matt Williamson’s Installing GoDaddy SLL Certificates on IIS7 talks generically how to install the GoDaddy SSL certificates, it isn’t detailed enough for SBS 2008. The steps below should provide detailed steps, specific for SBS 2008:
It’s important to use the Trusted Certificate wizard for the last step, to ensure that the certificate is bound to the correct IIS website, as well as TSGateway for remote desktop access. If you followed all the steps from GoDaddy to install the certificate, simply run the Trusted Certificate wizard and choose I want to replace the existing certificate with a new one, and you’ll get shown the trusted certificate and the self-issued certificate for your domain name, just choose the appropriate one based on the type and the expiration date:
On a final note, renewing your certificate after the year, just click that Add a Trusted Certificate link in the console but this time through choose I want to renew my current trusted certificate with the same provider, and follow the instructions!
I did want to call out that NetoMeter.com has a 4-step video process on how to do add GoDaddy SSL certificates to your SBS 2008 server, but a $30 monthly subscription is required to view it, which might be worth it depending on how much help you need with your SBS 2008 server, or might not be worth it if this is your only challenge.
Update – Windows Mobile 5
GoDaddy has e-mailed me regarding support for Windows Mobile 5 devices. WM5 devices older than the AKU2 update only need to have this patch installed. If it is an older WM5 device it needs to be unlocked to allow certificate installation. Once you meet all of these criteria, GoDaddy has provided steps to install the required certificates on your Windows Mobile 5 device. I will copy them here for convenience, although as a reminder, always check with GoDaddy for the latest steps!!
To install the root certificate on your Windows Mobile 5 device:
In many cases, a small office makes a decision about a server solution that isn’t actually what they need. Windows Standard Server will meet their needs, but it’s an expensive solution with generic features not specifically designed for a small office. In some cases, a simple client computer (Windows XP or Windows Vista) dropped into a corner, to act like a server, can provide a file sharing solution for a small office, but there is lack of security, throughput and simplified management.
There are certainly a lot of things to consider for a small office server. NetworkComputing.com has an article on all server hardware you should be thinking about. But what server solution do you use to take advantage of all this hardware? One not extremely well known solution is Windows Small Business Server.
Windows Small Business Server includes a simplified management experience, On Premise e-mail and web sharing content, as well as exceptional remote access functionality, all for close to the same price as that Generic Windows Standard Server, perfect for a small office wanting to centralize on a server. Small Business Server is specifically designed to provide a a simple solution for Small Offices (of less than 75 computer users), and provides plenty of features for end-users, administrators, and new with the 2008 version, customers via Office Live.
Not sure about where to start? try contacting one of the Small Business Specialists. Small Business Specialists dedicate their lives to putting servers into small offices. In fact, Dana Epp, one of the security focused specialists, and also a Most Valuable Professional, as a blog and discusses the top 10 reasons to get SBS 2008. Some great features include:
… and many more items.
Windows XP and Windows Vista, while able to share files, aren’t set up for performance access to shares for a small office, and Windows Server Standard server doesn’t provide simplified management, on premise email and easy to understand remote access for your office workers.
In addition to Windows based solutions, you can consider other operating systems, like a small office Linux server. but you have to ask yourself, what’s the cost of ownership? The biggest problem I have with Linux is total cost of ownership. Sure the solution is “free”, like a free puppy up front, and it seems like a good deal, but how much time do you want to spend on It versus running your business? Small Business Server opens an easy to use, friendly console right when you log in. on Red Hat, you have to type “control-panel” at a shell window? I mean if you want to make a change to the server 2 years later, do you want to re-learn how to use the system? Don’t get me wrong, I like Linux as much as the next person, but I have to re-learn it every time I touch it. The article talks about cost, and it’s true they talk about hardware costs only, and no operating system cost, but costs are not calculated in money only, they are calculated in time. Computer hardware is cheap compared to a salary for someone to manage a server. I just don’t believe Linux works as a small office server since you essentially need to keep an IT person on staff to manage it.
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.
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