CRM Over the Internet, Finally

Well it was almost a year ago when I first started fighting with CRM SBE trying to publish it over the internet. It has been a painful process and I have called on some of the smartest people I know to try and get this done. We have gotten very close, but have not found a complete solution until yesterday when I got a note from a guy I have never met in Brazil with the missing pieces. So Thank You to Marcelo Sauaf! I hope to meet you and buy you a drink one day soon.

HaveI told you all lately how much I think this community rocks!

If you would like step by step instructions to publish CRM SBE over the internet, see my site at http://www.sbs-rocks.com/CRM/CRMSBEviaISA2004.htm

And they told me it couldn't be done,
HA

WSUS 3.0 on SBS 2003 with CRM-SBE

So I am a little behind and haven't installed WSUS 3.0 yet and hearing all the success stories of how easy it installs I jump ring in on my production server, install the prerequisites, KB927891 , MMC 3.0 & Report Viewer and then reboot the server. When she comes back up I run setup for WSUS 3.0 and it is going along very nicely until near the end when it dies a horrible death.

So I hit OK and get

And once more and get

So you might have guessed at this point I wasn't smiling, so I did what anyone in my position would do, no I didn't start crying, I pinged the community to see if anyone had any ideas. Sometimes just talking through a problem bring the obvious to light. Yours and my favorite detective Susan found in the error log where the W3SVC service had trouble stopping so opened a DOS Box and try to stop it manually, it did in fact stop, but it took a little longer than one would expect. When I was explaining this of course I pointed out that it was normal due to CRM being on the box so there was more to stop. So that's when she stated the obvious solution that I had looked right past, stop the CRM service before you run the WSUS setup.

So hopefully I can save you the agervation of the initial install failure and let you know about this before you try. Once I stopped the CRM services the install went through without a hitch (ymmv), unfortunately the second time through it doesn't do an upgrade, it does a full install so you have to reset all the options.

Storage Craft Shadow Protect IT Edition

Tonight I did a demo of Storage Craft Shadow Protect IT Edition 3.0 for my IT Pro Group, Triad SBS Group and they asked me to post the steps I followed during the demo. So for all of them and anyone else who may be interested here is what I did to image an SBS 2003 Premium with CRM SBE from a single processor Intel desktop class machine to a dual processor Intel Xeon server. This system had 6 partitions and was about 24 Gb of used disk space. I completed the entire process in a little over an hour enlarging all the partitions in the process. What follows are my notes to myself to do the demo.

1. Make sure DSRM password is known!!
2. Make sure drive lettering is known!!
3. Make sure IP Addressing is know and which nic will be which!!
4. Backup from live SBS (20 min) (did ya notice nothing is installed to the system)
5. Mention issue with vpc and usb drives, recommend VM Ware for testing to avoid usb problems
6. Restore 6 partitions and run HIR (20 min) (don’t forget, refresh volumes as you create partitions)
7. Boot DSRM load Intel Inf’s & fix drive lettering on this pass (10 min)
8. Make sure nics are connected to active hub/switch
9. Boot Safe w/network (10 min) (will need to wait for network timeout)
10. Check if nic drivers loaded (load if necessary) configure IP addresses and order (5 min)
11. Final Boot (5 min)
12. Rerun CEICW, check logs (5 min)