Wednesday, January 5, 2011

SBS 2008 - Don't disable IPv6

I received an interesting email from one of our engineering team today, informing of the problem they had resolved with Exchange 2007 services not starting on SBS 2008.

Apparently, they needed to turn IPv6 back on. Which leads me to the point of this post. Don't turn off IPv6, especially not on SBS 2008. My college was lucky, in that restoring IPv6 brought everything back to life.

SBS 2008 relies on IPv6, especially with Exchange. Some of the symptoms are:

Exchange services failing to start
Very (as in 30+ minutes) long startup or startup hangs.
Network icons show of line
Errors in event logs

Browse through the SBS MVP blogs, they all tell you, don't do it! SBS Diva - Don't Untick the IPv6 Box

Their motivation for disabling was on the surface a valiant one, disable features not needed (nobody uses IPv6 in their networks anyway). Unfortunately, this is the wrong assumption. Many of the 2008 and later features will use IPv6, so whilst you might not have configured it, your network is running IPv6.

If you must disable IPv6, do it properly. Check the Official SBS Blog post here

No comments:

Post a Comment