Install Exchange 2007 SP3 Rollup 6 on SBS 2008

Mark Berry February 29, 2012

After successfully installing Exchange 2007 SP3 Rollup 5 on SBS 2008 a couple days ago, I decided to be brave and try Rollup 6 when it appeared on WSUS today.

SBS 2008 Attempts Multiple Simultaneous Backups

Mark Berry November 19, 2011

I first had this issue in July 2010. SBS 2008 would attempt to run two identical backups for each one that was scheduled. The duplicate backup would fail with Microsoft-Windows-Backup event 518, “Backup started at ‘[date and time]‘ failed as another backup or recovery is in progress. Please re-run backup.” But the original backup completed fine, so there was no need to re-run it.

How to Repair the SBSMonitoring Database

Mark Berry November 3, 2010

My daily report from SBS 2008 told me that MSSQL$SBSMONITORING had raised error event 8646 “Unable to find index entry in index ID 6, of table 357576312, in database ‘SBSMonitoring’. The indicated index is corrupt or there is a problem with the current update plan. Run DBCC CHECKDB or DBCC CHECKTABLE.”

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.

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.”