Be sure to check the basics first

Let me explain. One of my customers experienced a loss of emails coming into their network yesterday. I started with the normal checking, making sure services were running, drive space, etc. The error that people emailing them were getting was an NDR saying Unknown User.

After a few hours of troubleshooting and removing email filters and such, my boss and senior engineer found a problem with the mx record in dns. It seems that the local ISP that hosts the web site for this company had a system wide problem yesterday with changes made to the mx records of all their customers' domains. This meant that everyone that was sending mail to this domain wasn't even getting to the server.

Seems they forgot to let us know about this outage.

So next time a hard problem comes up that you can't figure out, be sure to check all your basics because it may be staring you in the face like it was for me the whole time.

Trend Micro C/S/M and Vista

Just found out that if you are using any version of Trend Micro C/S/M on your Small Business Server, there will not be Vista support until sometime April '07. Vist the Trend Micro Beta Portal to find out more. Also, view this page to get more information about Vista and Trend Micro.

Prepare your SBS domain for an additional R2 Domain Controller

I came across this article the other day and found it an interesting read. It's called, "How to prepare the SBS domain for an additional R2 Domain Controller". It walks you through how to upgrade the Active Directory Schema on an SBS server to R2 if you purchase a new member server preloaded. Basically it uses the disk from the Server 2003 R2 set and runs the adprep tool from within it. After that you can insert additional domain controllers that are Server 2003 R2 into any SBS network. Click here to view the article.

SBS 2003 R2: Vista and Office 2007 compatibility update

To all of you that manage an SBS network, this is for you...

An update will be sent through the Microsoft Update to Windows SBS 2003 with SP1 and Windows SBS 2003 R2 customers in the March timeframe. If you need the update before then, it can also be downloaded. For more information on how to download, please read the Vista and Office 2007 FAQs.

The download will be available as of February 9th in the English, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, French,German,Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Czech, Hungarian, Portuguese, Turkish, and Greek.

For additional details, please see the following resources:
Vista and Office 2007 FAQs
Related Knowledge Base Articles
KB 926505 – Update for Windows Small Business Server 2003: Windows Vista and Outlook 2007 compatibility
KB 911829 – Outlook Web Access (OWA) update
KB 929556 – Firewall Client for ISA Server
KB 930414 – ISA Server 2004 update package for Vista 64-bit editions
KB 930955 – Vista User Profile WMI Provider
KB 931095 – Regarding Outlook users; note: this is a catch all KB for someone who has XP with Outlook 2007 – a separate update is not required, it is the same update as mentioned in KB 926505 Microsoft Download Center - Using Windows Vista and Outlook 2007 in a Windows Small Business Server 2003 Network:
https://mail.techisc.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=46E95C56-1A4C-45BD-8D69-5F41FF8F1F22%26displaylang=en

Related Microsoft Blogs:
https://mail.techisc.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://blogs.technet.com/sbs/
https://mail.techisc.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://blogs.msdn.com/sbsdocsteam/default.aspx
https://mail.techisc.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://blogs.technet.com/kevin_beares/default.aspx

I'm back

The last time I posted in this blog was in the beta days, man things have changed. I am still here, alive and in one piece. I am liking the new version being integrated with gmail. Since I had a gmail account already, I was able to upgrade smoothly. Google will rule the world someday.

Anyway, from this point on my blog will be used for posting general updates about myself and technical information on products I work with in my day to day job as a field technician in the I.T. field.

I hope you find it as useful as I have found others to be. Please feel free to post comments as they have been opened up for anyone to post.

See ya soon.