SBS 2008 & SBS 2011 Best practices

SBS 2008 & SBS 2011 best practices

Depending of your experience these tips will be useful or useless.

For people, like me, that managed servers based on Windows 2003 and SBS 2003 these best practices will save you hours of troubleshooting, maintenance and headaches!  :-)

1.       Joining  computers to the SBS domain.

By default, you will go on the computer itself that you want to join the SBS domain. You will go to the system's properties, change computer name, workgroup to domain as shown here under:

It will work, your computer will join the domain BUT ......

You will get issues like DCOM errors (10009) on the eventlog of the server. Why?? Because in an SBS 2008 or 2011 domain, the server will periodically scans your computer to get his status and generate a daily report on the health of the complete network.

If you simply join the domain from the computer itself, your Windows' firewall won't be configured correctly to accept RPC request from the server.

The best way to join an SBS 2008 & 2011 domain, is to use the following website: http://connect/

Why?

Because, it will launch a wizard that will check your computer settings and will determine if your computer is compliant with SBS domain.
If your computer is compliant, during the joining process, it will also configure DCOM and the firewall to let your computer be managed and monitored by the SBS server.

Tip: http://connect permits also to identify DNS issues on your client computer. For example, bad DNS suffixes entries.

This post is not finished, just give me time ;-)