As I previously mentioned I have been installing a Windows Home Server so as to test and evaluate it. I believe it is a product that is going to be very useful to a number of our clients.
I ordered the 120 day evaluation kit from Microsoft and it arrived about 10 days after ordering.
The Kit comes with 2CDs and a DVD in a cardboard sleeve and has a full licence key enclosed.
The DVD is an installation disk, and the two CDs are the client connector disk and the restore disk.
I had read the instructions first and also done a fair amount of research online so I was prepared. The machine I planned to install it on is a Pentium 4 Dual Core with 2GB RAM and 4 250GB Hard drives. It was running Vista, and was sitting in my server room. Its main use was to hold a large amount of Games, TV and Movies - about 600GB worth.
Following Scott Hanselman's, Steve Richards and Bill Gates lead, I have decided to share my office and workspace setup.
This isn't meant to be a gloat about the technology I use rather an explanation of the tools that I use in my job. Plumbers and electricians have cool vans full of all their gear and they probably spend more on that than I have on this.
My office is around 4 metres square, though one corner is chamfered off. In order to maximise the space available and still create enough room for my staff to work I have a real mixture of furniture. My desk is a curved reception desk I picked up second hand from the gym when they remodelled. It has nice deep drawers on both sides and the 90 degree curving space is an excellent fit for the 4 monitors I work on - 2 x 22" and 2 x 19" wide screens. It also holds current files and data, pens, blank cds, odds and ends and all the cables to connect my mobile phone, camera, video camera and creative zen. On top at each end I store things that I don't need to look at but need to access. In the middle I have a photo frame of my 4 kids and a Lego Bionicle I was given when leaving a client.
Susan Bradley AKA the SBS diva is a SBS 2003 Legend!
Following normal Microsoft practice of patching what aint broke and then wondering why it is broke, I installed the Best Practices Analyser last week on my SBS2003 server. Previously it had been running absolutely perfectly. (well as perfectly as a Microsoft server can get - only needed restarting every 2 weeks or so)
The BPA told me my system was largely ok but I should fix some things. With the assistance of Susan I duly fixed these things.
I had a few dramas installing the side by side WSS3.0 installation on my SBS2003 server. I had a error when running the Sharepoint Products and Technologies Configuraation wizard.
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The error was:
Failed to create the configuration database
An exception of type System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException was thrown.
Additional exception information: Could not find the stored procedure
'dbo.proc_getObjectsByClass'.
I posted the problem in the Microsoft partners community newsgroup and got a prompt reply from Robert Li at Microsoft. I needed a hotfix for KB934790. After installing this I was able to complete the rest of the instructions in the installation guide.
Thanks to Susan and Robert for the help!
I installed the SBS2003 Best Practices Analyser the other day.
I didn't have many things that needed fixing and most of them were pretty simple to resolve after I read Susan the SBS Diva's blog and got pointed to a list of SBS BPA Known Issues/Common Questions
I was able to fix the TCP chimney issue, upgraded Exchange server to Service Pack 2, changed the default .NET version for my SharePoint sites, turned of EDNS, and a few other minor issues.
Today I decided to install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 on my SBS2003 server. Actually I didn't just decide, I have been planning and thinking about this for sometime.
With some help from Susan the SBS diva I found the following pages and steps to do this.
Some other pages I looked at and reviewed were:
The Company Web in SBS 2003
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Document: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Quick Reference Guide
Gidday
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