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Migrate SBS 2011 Standard to Windows Server 2016

March 28, 2017 by Robert Pearman 174 Comments

Your trusty old SBS 2011 is finally being retired. It had a good run. It probably still works but you cant get the parts, and the cloud is so appealing and for whatever reason you have, you are putting in a new on premises DC.

Hey, you don’t have to justify it to me. Chances are you shipped Exchange off to the cloud long ago, your clients never really ‘got’ SharePoint and SQL was just used by the backup software and WSUS.

The only thing we want to migrate is Active Directory and File & Print services. Read more of this post

Filed under Exchange, General, PowerShell, SBS S, Tips & Tricks Tagged with Active Directory, Migration, SBS 2011, Server 2016

SBS 2011 How To Backup Your EFS Recovery Agent Certificate

March 28, 2017 by Robert Pearman 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.

Read more of this post

Filed under Backup, General, SBS E, SBS S, Tips & Tricks Tagged with EFS, Encryption, recovery, Small Business Server

SBS 2011 Standard – Disable TLS 1.0

December 14, 2015 by Robert Pearman 79 Comments

Post Updated 05/07/16

So you have completed a PCI Compliance scan, and you need to disable TLS 1.0?

You may have found the instructions here from TechNet which explain how to edit the registry to disable TLS 1.0, SSL 2.0 and SSL 3.0. What they don’t go onto explain is that this will break your RDP/RDP Gateway Connections.

Given that , as I understand it, the requirement to disable TLS 1.0 is being enforced from June 2016 I thought it was worth running through and sharing the process.

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Filed under General, PowerShell, SBS S, Tips & Tricks Tagged with PCI, RDP, SSL, TLS

Small Business Server 2011 Standard–Windows 10

August 17, 2015 by Robert Pearman 32 Comments

Updated 15/08/2016

Following a comment below, i revisited and noticed an error in my syntax. Confirming this does indeed work on 10586 (1511) and 14393 (1607)

I recently did a series of posts about Essentials Servers and Windows 10.

I am just picking up on one issue with SBS Standard (2011) where you have to manually edit a file relating to the /Connect process.

Normally this is straight forward, and the instructions on the MS blog post are fine, except it gave me a major OCD headache. Read more of this post

Filed under General, SBS S, Tips & Tricks Tagged with SBS Standard, Supported OS, Windows 10, XML

SBS, Essentials, RWA and SSL

February 1, 2013 by Robert Pearman 9 Comments

I have blogged before about setting up the RWA on Essentials, we all remember that mammoth post right?

The countless hours we wasted trying to make the wizard work, troubleshooting certificates with GoDaddy, Enom, Microsoft and that’s before you worry about where your domain name is hosted. Thankfully, or should it be, mercifully, in Essentials 2012 the whole wizard process is a lot cleaner and dare i say more intuitive.

That is, however, unless you lack an understanding of what this stuff actually does and how it works.

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Filed under Essentials, SBS E, SBS S, SSL, WSE Tagged with Essentials, RWA, SBS 2011, SSL, Windows 2012

Quick Fix: SBS 2003 Lost Cals

October 12, 2012 by Robert Pearman 6 Comments

This is well known and well documented issue, there is an excellent post from SBS MVP Phillip Elder on his very popular blog about it and has the perfect resolution. http://blog.mpecsinc.ca/2007/09/sbs-lost-cal-recovery-or-reset-cal.html

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Filed under General, SBS S, Tips & Tricks Tagged with CALS, Disk Space, SBS 2003

Windows MultiPoint Server with SBS 2011

October 8, 2012 by marinamvp 4 Comments

MultiPoint server can be joined to the SBS 2011 domain, just like any other server. However, before the MultiPoint server (or any other additional application server) will show up in RWA, we will have to add a special registry key and add the server name on the SBS 2011.