Author: sbsfaq

Body: I’ve heard in the community over the last few weeks a growing concern about various aspects of HP’s products and service/support.  A large amount of this is coming from the Australian partner community.  I’ve taken a number of those concerns direct to HP for their input and they are mobilising a team to better understand and address the issues.  In the interim, can I ask that people that have issues get their facts together for me.  HP will want to understand things like the problems experienced, specific details such as case numbers, dates of issues and the like.  If … Continue reading Problems with HP?

Body: The one and only SBSDiva – Susan Bradley has taken it upon herself to get out there before the launch of Windows 7 and save the world with her one woman marketing campaign.  Susan has had this cool logo created to help promote the fact that User Account Control should be left ON in Windows 7.  This much despised feature of Windows Vista has been massively improved in Windows 7 and now has various levels of “make my computer unsafe” vs the Vista “Make it safe or Make it unsafe” Anyway – consider this seriously when you are using … Continue reading Susan saves the world with a zipper…

Body: Well – after months of testing the first service pack for Windows Server 2008 was released – Service Pack 2… yes – that sound strange doesn’t it – the first Service Pack for Server 2008 is SP2, that is because Server 2008 was released at SP1 level because it shares the same code base as Windows Vista.  So Microsoft have now created Service Pack 2 – which applies to both Vista AND Windows Server 2008 (and therefore SBS 2008 and EBS 2008 and Windows Server 2008 Foundation too). Tonight I decided to “quickly install” Vista Service Pack 2 on … Continue reading Windows Server 2008 and Vista Service Pack 2

Body: Microsoft today announced they will block access to MSN Instant Messenger for 5 countries on a sanction list according to the US government.  CRN reported it here Ok – so with all the hype about cloud computing, the users are not supposed to care where there data is as it’s “in the cloud”.  Here’s the catch – what if your data actually resides on servers on foreign soil and suddenly due to government action you no longer have access to that data? How will your business survive? Now I admit that the risk to many of us here in … Continue reading SaaS / Cloud Computing – interesting concern

Body: Last week Trend announced the release of a number of patches for their Worry Free Business Security products targeted at the SMB market. These patches are both a rollup of all accumulative patches plus an additional patch that did not quite make the rollup itself. The information below comes from an informal channel communication that Kieran Cook – one of the local Trend engineers sends out from time to time.  This is EXACTLY the type of communication we need to see from vendors on a more regular basis. It leaves NO DOUBT what patches need to be applied and … Continue reading Trend Micro WFBS 5.1 and 5.0 Patches

Body: Microsoft today announced that they have another SharePoint “opps” in the works.  The fact that the blog post came from a Corporate Vice President suggests to me just how bad this “opps” is and also just how seriously they take it.  The blog post here shows that if you apply Service Pack 2 to a full SharePoint 2007 server, or Search Server 2008 Express that it will stop working after 180 days.  They are working on a bug and will have something out shortly. THIS DOES NOT AFFECT SBS 2008 – It does however affect Search Server 2008 Express … Continue reading Microsoft SharePoint set to expire

Body: Just read a cute news article that talks about “International Talk like Yoda” day. As I read it I can’t help but think of how this relates to the SMB IT Professional community.  No – not the actual talking like Yoda, but the persona that he is. Yoda is certainly old and wise – that much is for certain. In all the Star Wars movies, you see Yoda using his years of experience to solve problems and defeat enemies much bigger and stronger than him.  How does he do that I keep thinking… then I realise that it’s actually … Continue reading The difference between Yoda and you

Body: Got a call from a friend yesterday.  He had some problems with his network which essentially revolved around Active Directory being messed up.  The exact details are a little unclear, but the long and short of it was that around a week back, their main DC had some hardware problems so they resolved it by transferring the system over to Hyper-V (not sure how they did this either).  The AD problems continued and they dug deeper. Along the way (and I don’t know where/when) they decided to DCPromo two of their non virtualised DC’s down to member servers (one … Continue reading How to mess up your network with virtualisation…

Body: Doing a migration tonight and thought that I’d document some of the experiences for those that are interested.  This is not a complete list, just some things that I see people falling over.  This post is NOT A SUBSTITUTE for reading the excellent documentation that Microsoft have provided. Run the SBS 2003 BPA and fix EVERYTHING listed – even the caution items.  I had the following issues to address.  The first one is ok – the C: drive is 100GB in size and there is 6GB free. The second one is due to the broadcom network driver being dated … Continue reading SBS Migration to SBS 2008 – Experiences today