Costas Tsaklas’ Blog

A couple of weeks ago I decided to build a new computer. It has been a couple of years since I build the last one so I had to go and do some research on the kind of box I wanted to put together. The one that I was replacing was an Athlon64 3400 with 2 GB of memory. That is still a good PC, but with a single core you have to be patient for it to complete one task before it starts another. Right…. “Patient”… that’s not me.

After spending a couple of days reading reviews at newegg.com I decided that I would go with an INTEL Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4Ghz on an ABIT IP35 Pro motherboard. I read good reviews for both of these components so I decided to build the system around them.

The next component was the CPU fan. For that I decided to go with the Zalman 9700. The rest of the components are listed below:

1. Power Supply: Cooler Master eXtreme RP-500-PCAR
2. Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB SATA 3.0Gb/s
3. DVD Drive: LITE-ON SATA DVD Burner with LightScribe
4. Video Card: EVGA 256MB PCI Express x16

Picking the memory was tricky. Initially I ordered G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) because I thought it was very cheap. After the components arrived I started putting the box together and I had problems making it work. I spend a considerable amount of time at the ABIT support forums trying to identify which components had the problem. It came down to three of them: Motherboard, Memory, DVD-Drive.

The DVD-Drive was making weird noises so I decided to RMA it immediately. Newegg is top-notch on returns. They gave me the RMA number and then I placed an order for a new drive. This time I went with the ASUS SATA with LightScribe. This is a really good drive.

The guys at the ABIT forums, suggested that I should try different kind of memory. So I RMAed the memory and ordered a different brand (PQI) from a vendor in California. The chips I ordered were 4 modules of 1 GB each. I don’t know if I did the right thing spending the money on 4GB, because Vista doesn’t recognize more that 3.2GB (or so) of memory. I should have mentioned that the plan was to install Vista Ultimate.

Finally, after I changed the DVD Drive and the memory, the problems persisted. It came down to RMA the motherboard. Christmas eve the new motherboard arrived. I put everything together and the system went up with no issues. I restored Vista Ultimate to the new computer, using StorageCraft ShadowProtect Desktop Edition For me, this software is invaluable. I have used it over and over again for restores on the same and different hardware and never let me down.

The new system is up and running as of today and I’m a happy camper. What did I learn from this experience?

a. According to LITE-ON support (the vendor for the first DVD drive) their drives can’t read some of the Vista DVDs. I was using the one that came with the Action Pak and I couldn’t boot from it. I still wait for their ‘lead engineer’ to call me back on the issue.

b. The G.SKILL memory was ok. I didn’t have to return it. It would have been good to have that memory instead of the one I currently have because the motherboard can go up to 8GB so I could just spend another $100 and be at 8GB. Now, if I want to upgrade to 8GB I have to throw all 4, 1GB modules

c. The motheboard was defective. It happens. I think the ABIT motherboard is top-notch. Lots of features and easy to overclock the chip for those interested.

BTW… I never overclocked a CPU before, so I decided to do it. It was easy. I just changed a couple of settings within the BIOS and the INTEL Core 2 Quad 2.4 Ghz, right now runs at 3.0Ghz.

Another very interesting post which includes three articles on how to implement Forms based authentication on MOSS2007 and WSS 3.0.

Here is the link: Forms Based Authentication

The Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team released SP1 for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. The service pack fixes a number of issues that existed in the initial release.

For Windows Small Business Server 2003 (and any other supported platform of course) that doesn’t have WSS 3.0 installed, there is a Slipstream release that includes SP 1.

Download and install the full WSS 3.0 with SP1 release at the following link:

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with Service Pack 1

If you already have WSS 3.0 installed the service pack can be found here

The first step is to make a backup of the current site. Go to the command prompt and then navigate to the following directory:

c:\program files\common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\Bin

In that directory run the following command:

stsadm.exe -o backup -url http://companyweb -filename c:\backup.dat -overwrite

After the operation completes successfully, copy the backup.dat file to the c:\ drive of the Windows Server 2003 you want to restore it.

On the Windows Server 2003, go to the Control Panel | Add/Remove Windows Components and install ‘Windows SharePoint Services‘. Select the ‘Typical Installation‘. After the installation completes, go to Administrative Tools | Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager and create a new web site. For this post, I will name it ‘intranet’ and I will use the same IP add the IP of the server (port 80)

The next step is to create an A record in the SBS DNS Server to point to the IP address of the site.

Now we are ready to extend the new IIS site. Go to Administrative Tools | SharePoint Central Administration and under ‘Virtual Server Configuration’ click on ‘Configure virtual server settings‘. From the ‘Virtual Server List‘ click on the name of the new IIS site. Click on ‘Extend and create a content database‘

Create a new application pool and name it ‘newcompanyweb‘ (it can be any name) and for the purposes of this post I will use the ‘Network Service‘ as the security account.

It is recommended to have a user-defined account that will run the application pool, so take that into consideration during your planning. Next we supply the email address of the site owner and under security configuration I use NTLM.

A new page will show us that the Virtual Server was Successfully Extended. Click on the ‘OK’ button and exit the browser.

Go to Microsoft’s web site, download and install Windows SharePoint Service Pack 3

Open a new Command Prompt window and navigate again to:

c:\program files\common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\Bin

It’s time to restore the backup to its new location. Run the following command:

stsadm.exe -o restore -url http://intranet -filename c:\backup.dat -overwrite

Open the browser and type: http://intranet

At this point you should be able to see the ‘companyweb’ site from SBS on it’s new home on Windows Server 2003, under a new name

Windows Essential Business Server (code name “Centro”) was announced today. Cool stuff…

More information can be found at Microsoft Small Business Community Blog

TechNet published a HOW-TO document on migrating SBS 2003 to new hardware. So far there were two options: Either imaging the server and restoring it on different hardware ( personally I like Storagecraft ) or use a more popular technique from SBS-MVP, Jeff Middleton

The new document can be found here

The Internet is full of gems but it takes a bit of time to discover them. One of these gems is a VBScript I recently found that automates backing up MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 servers.

MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 backup script

Up to now I had a batch file that was doing a similar thing, but this script is way better and I couldn’t pass it by. I tested the script on both an SBS 2003 server and a Win2K3 server which was part of an SBS 2003 domain. The script worked flawlessly with the exception of the email part which need a bit of tweaking to make it work with the SBS Exchange server.

I’m not a MAC user but I’m sure there are shops out there that are using it extensively.

Eriq Neale posted a how-to document on connecting a Macintosh to an SBS 2003 server that I think will come handy when clients want to deploy Macs within their SBS infrastructure.

A very useful white paper on backup and recovery of SharePoint installations was posted at TechNet. The document was brought to my attention by a post at the Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog

There was definitely a need for a step-by-step guide on backing up SharePoint installation. Although the document refers to MOSS 2007, the concepts are applicable to WSS 3.0 as well.

Here are some more online video clips on SharePoint

http://sharepoint-screencasts.com/