Category: SBS

Five years ago, I was a relatively early adopter of Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS) 2003. One of the servers I set up back then is still going strong today. However, the self-signed certificate that the server uses for SSL transactions was set to expire five years after creation, and we just reached that mark. […]

Installing Java updates is generally so easy and inconsequential that we often do it without thinking when prompted. But when you see that little orange icon on a server running BlackBerry Enterprise Server, don’t click so fast!

Actually, let me rephrase that title. I think it should be "Why? Is SBS 2008 better than SBS 2003?" There are few if any people on the planet more familiar with Small Business Server than Microsoft’s Sean Daniel. Sean recently posted a feature comparison between SBS 2003 and SBS 2008. What strikes me about this […]

I narrowly averted a serious problem on a client’s server today. I got an alert from the server that the C: drive was down to about 50 MB of free space (and falling). That’s very bad. It turned out that the problem was caused by an expanding log file created by Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. […]

Problem: The SSL certificate for mail.myclient.com expired. The certificate had been purchased from GoDaddy and was installed on the server by a former network admin. No one had any idea whose GoDaddy account had been used originally, and GoDaddy couldn’t tell us for security reasons. So there was no easy way to renew the certificate. […]

Microsoft is conducting a survey of people who use Small Business Server about their experiences with the Windows SBS Community. I have some serious problems with the survey and I’ve expressed them here. I’ve gotten some heat for my criticism here (and maybe here — I’m not sure exactly what Vlad is getting at.) Feel […]

I have posted a substantial update to my instructions for installing WSS 3.0 on SBS 2003 Standard. If anyone has time to double-check my work and fix any problems, I would greatly appreciate it.

David, usually when I have Outlook open my mail comes in automatically, but now I have to hit Send/Receive every time. How do I fix this? I get asked this question at least once a month, so I figured it was worth writing up here. If Outlook loses its connection to the Exchange server for […]

This is not a very interesting issue for the “masses.” I’m posting this in the hope that someone else will find it later and be spared some time troubleshooting. Here was the scenario: Server: SBS 2003 Standard SP1, Exchange 2003 SP2 Don and Jorge have WM5 phones Don had absolutely no problem synchronizing his phone […]

How many times has this happened to you? Somebody wants all the mail addressed to a generic address like info@theirdomain.com to be forwarded to a particular user account. So you go into the user account properties in Active Directory and try to add an SMTP address on the E-mail Addresses tab. But oops! You get […]