W32Time Errors in a Hyper-V Virtual Environment

Mark Berry August 27, 2010

I am running Small Business Server 2008 SP2 under Hyper-V. On a Server 2003 member server, also running under Hyper-V, I was getting frequent W32Time warnings errors in the System event log (Event IDs 38, 24, and 29 in that order).

SBS 2008 Post-Install Tasks

Mark Berry August 12, 2010

I recently installed Small Business Server 2008 Standard in a Hyper-V virtual machine hosted by Windows Server 2008 R2. For SBS 2008, I used the media that has Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 pre-applied. Here I list several additional updates and fixes that I applied after the install. In general I’m trying to follow the advice on the Microsoft knowledge base and in The Official SBS Blog so that my system will be using supported configurations.

Re-enable BitLocker Auto-Unlock after System Volume Restore

Mark Berry August 11, 2010

Today I did a disaster recovery test on my Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V host. I used Windows Backup to do a bare metal restore of only the system volume. As expected, after the restore, the system volume was no longer encrypted. But even after re-encrypting the system volume, I was unable to set the data volumes to automatically unlock. Instead, it displayed “Data error (cyclic redundancy check).”

How Secure are TrueCrypt and BitLocker?

Mark Berry August 3, 2010

I’ve been using TrueCrypt for a while, and have recently switched to BitLocker. My main purpose is to encrypt backup disks that are taken off site, though I plan to use BitLocker for an internal data volume as well.

Recently a colleague noticed that a $495 program called Passware Kit Enterprise is claiming “Instant decryption of BitLocker To Go USB disks.” In fact they claim to be able to decrypt BitLocker and TrueCrypt disks, as well as PGP volumes. Really? How does that work? Are my efforts to encrypt sensitive data useless?

Run 16-Bit Program Across Network

Mark Berry August 2, 2010

Okay I’ll admit it. I have a hard time upgrading programs when the old version is working well.

I have a 1995-era time tracking program from KMR Consulting called Timeclock that I still use. I run it across the network from my Windows XP SP3 and 32-bit Windows 7 machines. However after changing the host from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008, the 16-bit reporting module gives me this message:

Can’t run 16-bit Windows program
Cannot find file L:\TimeClock\Timeclk.mcb\TCREPORT.EXE (or one of this components).

But why does changing the host file system matter?

Setting Up Email Connectors in SBS 2008

Mark Berry July 26, 2010

My SBS 2008 environment needs to accommodate a couple of non-standard email requirements:

• I use cloud-based email filtering, and I only want to allow incoming email from the IP addresses of those service providers.
• My PBX in a Flash machine is set up to send email through the SBS server. Rather than figure out how to do authenticated email from Linux, I just wanted to allow anonymous senders inside the local intranet. Same for my classic ASP site, installed directly on the SBS server, that sends email using ASPEmail.

SBS 2008 Antivirus Exclusions

Mark Berry July 24, 2010

SBS does so many things that there are lots of antivirus exclusions to make. Starting from my old SBS 2003 list, and working through the extensive research in this post, I came up with the following list for my SBS 2008 exclusions.

SBS 2008 Slow Startup and Shutdown

Mark Berry July 24, 2010

In my initial RAID 10 tests, SBS 2008 booted in 1 minute 43 seconds and shut down in 4 minutes 10 seconds. Now that I’ve been running for a couple weeks, the shutdown time has remained constant, but the boot time has increased dramatically:  a good boot is 3 minutes 10 seconds; the next test took a whopping 10 minutes 15 seconds to get to the logon prompt, mostly “Applying computer settings.”