Haha ya. Its a office my partner and I picked up to manage through our small business. We manage the network entirely and he has no logins after he screwed up something one time. The servers he still manages AD accounts and stuff and mainly does desktop support like “my email wont open” problems.
We re wrote the contract with him so when he does something moronic and causes us to get called or go onside, we bill instead of cover under maintenance.
I have no idea why he picked up SBS or even know what the hell they are running on it. They have 2 Windows 2003 Standard boxes they run. one is the domain controller that runs DHCP, DNS, AD, etc. The second is a application box that runs the back end for their application their business relies on. Their third server is a file server box we setup running FreeNAS. We got an email from him earlier in the week saying that he bought a new server and was installing SBS on it and 5 days later we get fun license errors. I wish I could see some peoples resumes we deal with.
I do need to look up that IP setting in the bios. I might risk having him go into it and making sure its turned on. Our data center has a IP enabled power strip and that setting on now that I think about it since we can hard reset servers from the strip and they come back up. I have to look into the bios to find that setting.
You may want to tell him that he ordered the wrong OS, and have him wipe it and purchase 2003 server. I am positive he didn’t purchase any CAL with it regardless, so hell… since he is doing it illegally anyways, tell him to install 2003 server standard with the key from one of the other boxes in the network (sigh). If he is using exchange, he should purchase 2003 server standard edition and then exchange seperately so that it will play nicely with the other servers.
You will have to make it a domain controller as that is what it is designed to be, and MUST be, regardless of the other servers on the network. It is “small business” for a reason, as it is designed to be the ONLY server on a network.
In other words… yea, um… have fun fixing that network…
Yea. We sent a lot of last night reconfiguring it. We had to push all the rules to the SBS and make it the primary DC and it stopped the license error. What a pain tho.
I wish I could fire this guy but hes the one that signs our checks.