One of the questions I’ve seen come up regarding the technical issues regarding SBS Aurora is where is the DHCP on the box.
Well it’s on “a” box but not on Aurora as it will be shipped. And the reason is that Aurora’s intent is to be the first domain server after a peer to peer setting and that DHCP will be on the router/firewall. To make it easier for the transition on Aurora you don’t have to change the router at all, the server will have a dynamic IP and pick up the IP address from the server.
That doesn’t mean you can’t install it and enable it just like it is in SBSv7. In fact it will be an item we’ll be documenting in the Aurora build document.
But to make it a painless transition from peer to peer Aurora will assume the DHCP is turned on the router.
I too was surprised by the lack of DHCP. I understand why they did that but I don’t like it.
Maybe for the WHS (Vail) it might make sense, but for a middle SBS product?
While I haven’t tried Vail yet, I don’t see how much more you could strip out of Aurora and have SBS people like it.
Personally, I’d have two products:
– Vail for 1-10 users (no group, no domain, simple setup)
– SBS7 for 10+ users (like SBS 2008)
I don’t like the drive partitioning in Aurora. It wipes out your drive (it does warn you) and gives you ZERO input into the partitioning. I’m not crazy about the ‘storage pool’ either.
Aurora creates a “DE Disk” using all but 60G of the drive and formats that as FAT32?! Then is somehow mounts four NTFS drives (more like shares?) that all show the same size?
I booted the system and launched a ‘mini-xp’ to examine the drive. While I could ‘see’ and recover anything from the C: (boot) partition, the “DE Disk” appears as a 32M (not 32G) drive that is full? There is only one readable file (txt) warning not to touch anything. That drive is filled with .NG files.
There are many other things about Aurora that I don’t like (no groups, no NTFS permissions from the dashboard, dumbed down Group Policy, etc.).
Today I received an additional 4G of memory so now my test PC has the horsepower (really cheap these days!) to run SBS7. I hope that one lives up to my expectations.
Oh, I forgot to add (in Yoda Speak) …
I doubt, recommend Aurora, will I.