Friday, June 18, 2010

My first MS Support Call

I've had a strange issue with a SBS 2008 environment banging around for a while now which has had me stumped. We upgraded the client from SBS 2003 to 2008. It was a straight forward migration without any real issues. However, some months later users began complaining about not being able to set Out of Office.

Long story short, we've exausted our ideas. So time to log my first support call. Two hours on the phone and I have a case number. Can't wait to post updates to how this goes.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Cisco 800 series router - Password reset

How to reset the password and configuration on a Cisco 800 series router here.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

SBS Licence Issues

Use the Transfer Wizard.

SBS Licence file location - Copied below to keep.

Small Business Server 2003 - The Dreaded 5 CAL Reset Issue
A runaway process on SBS2003 decided to fill up all the disk space on C: in the early hours of the morning. The fallout from this was the System log was corrupt and the SBS license data was reset to the default 5 CALs.
The System log was easy to fix - reboot the server.
The SBS license data was an absolute pain. I'd never run the "Back up licenses" utility in the Licensing section of Server Management. Microsoft have KB article
888818 discussing this, which is either re-enter the licenses, restore the C:\WINDOWS folder or restore a backup of the licenses.
The first wasn't an option as I was offsite and the person with the key to the safe wasn't in. The second was just not viable - why Microsoft couldn't specify which file/folder needed restoring I don't know. The third would have been OK if ever I had run it.
After much stuffing about I found that the SBS2003 licenses are kept in the licstr.cpa file in the WINDOWS\system32 folder. Thankfully, Microsoft actually keep an automatic backup of this in autolicstr.cpa. The simple process was to stop the License Logging Service, rename licstr.cpa to licstr.cpa.old, then copy autolicstr.cpa to licstr.cpa. After this I started License Logging Service and used Server Management to confirm that the licenses had been restored.

Issue was after a HIR with Storage Craft Shadow Protect, blog post here