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I have a SBS 2008 at home with a static ip. I have the server and a XP Pro domain member in my little network. To access domain servers or workstations you have to first install the SBS 2008 certificate. So I sent it in an email and installed the cert. I can access the workstation or the server in the domain from Vista boxes. I can access the computers from a Server 2003. I cannot access them from XP Pro boxes. I have tried 4 different XP boxes. 3 have IE7, one has IE8. One had SP2, the others … Continue reading VBScript problems on XP boxes going to remote on SBS 2003 and 2008 register mstscax.dll Send users the 08 cert

I had a backup failure at an account. I noticed that WSUS managed to get installed on my USB backup drive when I did the last WSUS upgrade. 30 gigs of stuff in content. I clicked on just English and ran the celanup wizard. That did virtually nothing over a long, long time. Plan on a day or more on that wizard. I found this post http://forums.technet.microsoft.com/en-US/winserverwsus/thread/59b5c659-b09e-4d05-84dc-04202fa9f136/ where I ended up here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/wsus/bb466192.aspx and downloaded the server diagnostic tool. I installed that tool at c:\wsuscleanup tool. I jumped out to the command prompt and did a cd\wsuscleanup tool. I ran this command … Continue reading Holy cow 30 gigs of WSUS content on the wrong drive

I had a user call saying their Out of Office was not working. A few years back I had another user at the same account report that same issue. I used mdbvu32 to dig out the crummy OOF and all was good when creating a new OOF. I think they refer to this as OOF but I do not get where the letters came from. OOO seems like what it should be.  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/248709 or this article with pictures is how you dig stuff out. http://www.msexchange.org/articles_tutorials/exchange-server-2007/tools/troubleshooting-out-of-office.html So I dug the stuff out just as the local administrator had done but no … Continue reading Out of Office not working with Exchange 2003 and Outlook 2007, MDBVU32 and OWA

http://blogs.technet.com/kevin_beares/archive/2008/05/23/the-windows-small-business-server-2008-ww-community-survey-is-live.aspx  The SBS team is curious about what you think and what you want. Spend a few minutes giving them some feedback. Just as a point of reference the SBS MVPs and the MVPs friendly to SBS are considered the minority.  What I mean is that a lot of my SBS friends run ISA and love/like it. They use SQL for line of business uses. We are constantly told that we are a minority. Maybe so, but we sure are vocal. If you love/like ISA or SQL let them know. Even if you don’t tell them what you think and … Continue reading SBS team invites your suggestions

I had a call that a user’s workstation is taking 5 minutes to boot up. I did some user file cleanup which should have nothing to do with the issue as the slow boot is before the user gets the CAD screen. I did an ipconfig/all to make sure dns was correct. I did an ipconfig/flushdns. I then updated the Realtek nic from a 2002 driver to a 2008 driver. I rebooted the workstation and it came up in a minute after the bios finished its stuff. Some computer manufacturers are not so good about getting you the latest nic drivers. … Continue reading Slow XP SP2 boot up, updated nic drivers fixed that.

I have all these crummy usb thumbdrives . Crummy means  too small to carry a lot of files on. I considered them useless until my Intel server said create a bootable usb thumbdrive and place the updates on the usb bootable thumbdrive. In the past I had to make a bootable floppy and then a few more floppys to update the various Intel utilities. Now they say place them all on a thumbdrive and boot from that. Finally a use for 128 meg thumbdrive. This guy has great instructions with screenshots for those of us who can’t read instructions. http://www.bay-wolf.com/usbmemstick.htm … Continue reading Tiny USB thumbdrives drives? Put them to use, or how to flash your server with a thumbdrive

I had a user buy some wham bam Dell portable pc for $4,000. It sure was fast with Vista Ultimate, Blue Ray, Bluetooth keyboard, lots of ram and processor. Well it sort of looks like a laptop but it weighs a lot. The primary business application does not run on Vista so we set him up to use the pretty new application server. He also has a dog slow XP laptop. I could not get the default printer to stick on the application server. I would log in with one laptop and set the default printer on the application server. … Continue reading I can’t get my default printer to stick on my application server. Make a group policy.

Here are some things I do. I may miss a step so you may have toconfirm things. After you added connection filter provider you need tomake sure you have checked that stuff in the default virtual server.Global Settings/Message Delivery right click Properties.Sender Filtering: Check Filter messages with a blank sender and Dropconnection if address filter matches filter.Connection Filtering: Add your favorite RBL services. I happen to use zen.spamhaus.org Please visit www.spamhaus.org to review terms and conditions to see if you are eligible to use their services.Intelligent Messaging Filtering: I set it at 7 and Reject. You wantreject so if there … Continue reading Exchange connection filter using a Real Time Block list, and IMFPerfmon.msc

I get a call that a new user cannot open tif or jpg file. When they go to Windows Explorer the file association is greyed out. I do a Google search and turn up a registry value of  hklm\software\microsoft\currentversion\policies\explorer add dword NoFileAssociate with a value of 0. Or if this is missing it is the same as a 0. Well I searched and searched for other answers as this key did not help. The searches also suggested the HKCU but I would get an error when trying to create a new dword when logged in as a workstation user.  I … Continue reading File association woes as a limited workstation user

I got a call from a co-worker at a pop up account. You know the people that call wanting a little help but not a lot. They got a new server with hardware SATA raid 1. They installed SBS on a 500 gig partition. Personally I like to see 30-40 gigs for the OS and one or two other partitions. One partition for Exchange databases. Another partition for data. I like to keep the C: partition fairly free of stuff. My though is that I can scandisk or defrag a 40 gig partition in short order. To scandisk a 500 … Continue reading ADMT and frugal Swing Migration