SBS 2011 How To Backup Your EFS Recovery Agent Certificate

March 28, 2017 by 15 Comments

Backup your EFS what? That is the reaction I have had from most people I mentioned this to.

I am working on a document to walk through migrating Active Directory from SBS 2011 to Windows Server 2016. As part of that document I wanted to include backing up the EFS Recovery Agent Certificate. Only I couldn’t because on my SBS Server, something had broken.

First off, a bit of background. If you don’t know, EFS is the Encrypted File System that is built into Windows. It allows anyone to encrypt a file.

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Filed under Backup, General, SBS E, SBS S, Tips & Tricks Tagged with , , ,

Essentials Server PCI Compliance and TLS 1.0

July 4, 2016 by 8 Comments

I recently wrote some articles for Third Tier regarding Essentials Servers and TLS 1.0, so if you are looking for guidance on what to do or how to do it, or even what happens when you have found out what to do and then done it. Look no further than the Third Tier blog.

http://www.thirdtier.net/2016/04/what-happens-when-you-disable-tls-1-0/

If you are also interested in SBS 2011 Standard, well then take a look at this.

Filed under Essentials, General, SBS E, Tips & Tricks, WSE Tagged with , ,

Quick Fix: Essentials Connector Install Fails after Windows 10 Rollback

December 16, 2015 by Leave a comment

metroI was helping a friend with some Essentials Connector install issues last night. One of the clients was a Windows 7 Pro machine, that had recently been rolled back from Windows 10. On this network the Server was a Windows Home Server 2011, and the connector had been working fine following the upgrade to Windows 10. After the roll back, the backups stopped working, so my friend decided to uninstall the connector and reinstall.

This is when he discovered he could not reinstall the connector. It would get to around 99.9% complete, and even appear in the dashboard, but at the last second the progress bar would start going back to the start and we would see an error on the Connector install screen.

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SBS 2011 Essentials & UEFI Client Backups

June 8, 2015 by 3 Comments

sbse-conI have been reinstalling my lab over the last week or so, moving away from a GUI based Server 2012 running Hyper-V, to the Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 OS. I am also now no longer having to swivel in my chair 90 degrees to manage the VMs, as i have installed the Hyper-V tools on my Desktop PC.

Anyway, as part of the rebuild i trashed all of my existing VMs and have built new ones. Starting with SBS 2011 Essentials. I installed, along side it, 2 clients. Windows 7 and Windows 8. I took advantage of the new Gen2 VM for Windows 8.1 and of course ran into an issue with the client backup.

There has been a hotfix available for this issue since at least 2013, so it was no surprise that i needed to download it. Read more of this post

Filed under Backup, Essentials, SBS E, WIN 8 Tagged with , ,

Windows Server Essentials – Configuration Troubleshooter

February 14, 2014 by 225 Comments

powershell2xa4I had a support case this week where it became apparent to me that there is no quick and easy way to test Essentials Servers for Configuration errors. Manually working through IIS or Certificates is prone to human error, as was proved to me, by me missing certain key things.

Uncharacteristically i decided to write a PowerShell script to save me from this sort of embarrassment in the future, and make me look really good next time i need to troubleshoot an Essentials Server.

You can download the tool from here, and am very interested to hear how it works for you.

If you have already downloaded it, i have updated the tool so you should download it again!

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Filed under Essentials, PowerShell, SBS E, Tips & Tricks, WSE Tagged with , , ,

Updates for Colorado based OS– Home Server 2011 & SBS Essentials

November 13, 2013 by Leave a comment

sbse-conA busy week for Updates for the Colorado product line, which is made up of SBS 2011 Essentials, Windows Home Server 2011 and Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials.

KBs 2885313, 314 and 315 respectively fix issues around IE 11 and 404 Directory not found issues.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2885313 – SBS 2011 Essentials

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2885314 – Windows Home Server 2011

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2885315 – Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials

Filed under General, SBS E Tagged with , ,

Manually creating a Certificate Request Windows Server 2012 Essentials (Essentials R2 & SBS 2011)

February 6, 2013 by 11 Comments

padlockFollowing on from my recent post about SSL issues, another topic of conversation is the actual SSL installation process for the RWA.

Again i have blogged on that before, and the new Essentials 2012 wizard makes the process a lot lot easier. However if you get stuck with generating a CSR (Certificate Signing Request) then you can always use IIS to do this for you.

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Filed under Essentials, SBS E, SSL, WSE Tagged with , , , , ,

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