Showing posts with label Small Business Server. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Small Business Server. Show all posts

Monday, February 25, 2008

Outlook 2007 with Vista running RPC Over HTTP

Recently updated workstations now running Outlook 2007 with Vista Business are giving me a Certificate Error when the user name and password is entered. "There is a problem with the proxy server's security certificate. The security certificate is not form a trusted certifying authority. Outlook is unable to connect to the proxy server (Error Code 8)"

You can install the certificates through Internet Explorer running with Administrator privileges but it’s easier to do it using the Certification Manager application. To start the Certification Manager go to the “Start” menu, type certmgr.msc and press enter.
Once inside the Certification Manager, right click on the “Trusted Root Certification Authorities” node, hover over “All Tasks” and then click on “Import…”






This will start the Certificate Import Wizard. Read through the first screen if you want and then click the next button. On the next screen click Browse, locate the certificate that you saved previously and click the next button again.


The next step will allow you choose the certificate store where you want the certificate saved, and this is the important part. I have tried several work flows to figure out where the certificate ends up if you let Windows automatically choose the store but it is never in the Trusted Root Certification Authorities. So, instead of letting Windows automatically choose this we are going to tell it where to put the certificate. Click the “Place all certificates in the following store” radio button and then click the browse button.

Check “Show physical stores” on the popup form and select “Local Computer” under “Trusted Root Certification Authorities”. Click OK.

Finally click next and then click finish to start the import. If everything worked fine then you will get a “The import was successful.” message. Congratulations, you have successfully imported the root certificate!


Don’t be surprised if you don’t see the new certificate in Certification Manager right away, you have click refresh button the toolbar before the certificate will show up in the list.
Have fun!

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Private User Settings when using Connect Computer Wizard

Over the last few years, we have come across several machines that give us a 'users data is private' error message when trying to join them to a SBS domain with the Connect Computer Wizard. In most cases, the Private Settings (navigate to the Users' My Documents folder, Right Click on the folder and choose the Sharing and Security). I find that if I check the box to make it Private, let it make the folder private, and then uncheck the box to clear the privacy setting, the wizard will then run perfectly.


Wednesday, January 09, 2008

CRM 4.0 Installed on our SBS Server 2003 r2

Well, we official have CRM 4.0 running on our SBS 2003 r2 server. I had to investigate an issue with SQL Server 2005 during the installation process. There is a hotfix KB936305 that needed to be installed to get SQL Server fully patched. Once we did that the installation worked great...

The outstanding issue that I have relates to the version of Microsoft CRM 4.0 that is allowed to be installed ON the SBS Server. Apparently, after talking with Microsoft Support reps on the private forums, ONLY the Workgroup edition (which is limited to 5 users) is supported on SBS 2003 r2. In my case, the only 'choice' I had when I installed was based on the product key I typed in. I used the Professional 'trial' key, with no problems, but am curious as to how I 'tell' the installation to install the Workgroup (we will have more than 5 users, so we'll need professional----Just like most of my customers).
We already have 1 member server on the domain running our support server, but I'd hate to have to throw a 2nd member server in the mix for maybe 10-15 users of CRM. I'll keep investigating this.

Monday, January 07, 2008

Fixing the SBS Monitoring and VSS errors (and backup not working)

Earlier today I posted that while my SQL Server 2005 upgrade seemed to work fine, the remaining MSDE 2000 instances (monitoring) were throwing errors in the Application log. I figured out how to fix it....

First of all, Microsoft Knowledgebase Article 920899 can be found here, and it fixed my problems. The first go around I missed the following steps, and once I completed that and rebooted the server, the backups worked, the Monitoring worked, etc.


1. Click Start, click Run, type cliconfg, and then click OK.
2. In the Client Network Utility dialog box, click to turn on the Enable shared memory protocol check box, and then click OK.
3. Restart the computer.

Now, I'm getting errors SQLVDI like this "
SQLVDI: Loc=CVDS::Cleanup. Desc=Release(ClientAliveMutex). ErrorCode=(288)Attempt to release mutex not owned by caller.
. Process=4068. Thread=5400. Client. Instance=. VD=. "

but I saw when researching the other issues that this wasn't a huge deal...It's covered via hotfix in KB934396 which can be found here.

The aftermath of upgrading to SBS 2003 r2

Ok, everything on the Sharepoint side of moving to SQL Server 2005 went very well, BUT now the SBSmonitoring service won't start, and I'm getting errors relating to Volume shadow copy services. In addition, the WSUS services are having problems connecting to the database. I've posted the event information to the microsoft sbs newsgroup, and hope to hear from them soon. It certainly isn't a huge issue, and the Sharepoint seems to work great on 2005.



I've configured the reporting services, and ended up having to go into IIS and reassign the .Net version to the old 1.x and then back to 2.0. Once I did that, I could browse to servername\Reports and get to the Report Manager. I created a new folder in the Report Manager, so that also indicated it was working. I also verified that Reporting Services were working by browsing to servername\ReportServer and saw the test folder with the SQL Version number:



Now that I have verified that all works, I'm off to work on installing CRM 4.0

Sunday, January 06, 2008

Microsoft CRM 4.0 SDK now available

The new SDK for Microsoft CRM 4.0 was released recently and you can find it here. If you do any development work with CRM, the SDK's have been a necessary resource. I'm still in the process of upgraing my SBS 2003 server to CRM 4.0, but just yesterday managed to upgrade it from SBS 2003 sp1 to SBS 2003 r2. It was quite the process upgrading the database from 2000 to 2005, but everything went through without a hitch. The microsoft instructions (found here) were just as good as the ones from smallbizserver.net (you have to have a subscription to use these, but they have screen shots)....

Saturday, November 24, 2007

What to do when it all goes wrong

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been doing battle with a 2003 Small Business Server that is out to get me. It's true... Have you ever had one of those customers that just _nothing_ goes right? Well, it's their server, and it's been this way with them on everything we do since the very beginning.

In this case, I've had to join a new laptop to their domain for a new employee. The laptop just had a fit joining through the connect computer wizard. I did all of the things that one is supposed to do: I verified that the wireless NIC was disabled, etc. Eventually, by brute force, we got it joined to the domain. Something still wasn't right.

The laptop connected to exchange with no problem, but whenever this user wanted to access a shared drive, shared printer, etc., a dialog box would open up asking her to authenticate. Nothing would work to login and authenticate. Not her username, not the administrator account information, not domain\username or domain\administrator, etc.

Soooo, it looked like a group policy problem to me, and I did a net share and noticed that the sysvol wasn't there. Not good.

I started focusing my attention on the server. The more I dug into it, the more I noticed conflicting error messages, conflicting symptoms, etc. The Sysvol would show up if I typed Net Share in the command prompt, but if I went to the run menu (from the server) and typed \\servername\sysvol, I got an error. Hmm....

I ran the SBS Best Practice Analyzer and fixed the normal stuff that showed up on that (chimney stack, etc).

Here's what I finally did to solve the problem...

1) Sacrificed a small chicken...

then, I got really serious.

- Disabled RSS as per KB 936594

- Checked for SMB signing policies in gpmc.msc

- Made the changes in Default Domain Controller Policy:

- Microsoft network client: Digitally sign communications (always) DISABLED

- Microsoft network client: Digitally sign communications (if server agrees) ENABLED

- Microsoft network server: Digitally sign communications (always) DISABLED

- Microsoft network server: Digitally sign communications (if client agrees) ENABLED

- Domain member: Digitally encrypt or sign secure channel data (always) DISABLED

- Domain member: Digitally encrypt secure channel data (when it is possible) ENABLED

- Domain member: Digitally sign secure channel data (when it is possible) ENABLED

- Domain member: Require strong (Windows 2000 or later) session key DISABLED

- Did gpupdate /force

- Client machines were able to access shares

I'm not sure what patch, etc changed some of these settings, but after doing this, I could see the sysvol locally. When I went back to the laptop, I rebooted, and had no problems with this user's machine accessing server resources.

I've never had this happen before, but am thankful it is finally resolved.

Friday, October 12, 2007

Setting Up SBS to Sync w/ External Time Source

On many of our SBS Servers we managed, we are getting various 29 errors in the log associated with time sync... It's important that we should configure the SBS 2003 server to send out time sync requests in Client Mode. To set the PDC to request it's time in client mode, please open a command prompt and run the following 4 commands:

w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:time.nist.gov,0x8 /syncfromflags:MANUAL
net stop w32time
net start w32time
w32tm /resync

Here we should use the "0x8" flag which sets the SBS server in Client Mode. These are the valid settings:

0x01 use special poll interval SpecialInterval
0x02 UseAsFallbackOnly
0x04 send request as SymmatricActive mode
0x08 send request as Client mode

To make sure that the clients are time syncing with the server, issue these 2 commands from the command prompt once:

net time /setsntp:servername
w32tm /resync (for XP)
w32tm -once -v (for W2k)

Friday, August 18, 2006

Shared Calendar Entries in Outlook Web Access (OWA)

I know that when your remote, sometimes the OWA tool doesn’t do all the stuff that Outlook does. I have been asked this before, and it’s a neat tip that I thought I’d share....

If you need to look at Someone elses’ shared calendar, just type this into your browser (or bookmark it)...


daily calendar view:
https://servername/exchange/displayname/calendar/?cmd=contents&view=daily

weekly calendar view:
https://servername/exchange/displayname/calendar/?cmd=contents&view=weekly

monthly calendar view:
https://servername/exchange/displayname/calendar/?cmd=contents&view=monthly

Specific date:
https://servername/exchange/displayname/calendar/?cmd=contents&view=daily&d=3&m=5&y=2002

I've used this in the past when offsite to see if I needed to schedule time with one of my team for a customer or prospect...