04Aug2016
01Aug2016
Hyper-V Failover Cluster: Affordable HA for the SMB
Next to Office 365, virtualization is still the number one recommendation I make to small businesses. It's a no-brainer. Enabling Hyper-V opens up so many great opportunities--grow your server's CPU, RAM or storage on the fly, perform host-level backups, Live Migrate to new hardware with no downtime, use Hyper-V Replica or Azure Site Recovery...
29Jul2016
Permissions required for secure roaming profiles & redirected folders
This post could also be titled "How to break permission inheritance properly, without breaking everything else," and the advice applies well beyond the scope of maintaining roaming profiles and redirected folders. I often run into a lot of new clients that are incorrectly configured when it comes to redirected folders & roaming...
25Jul2016
What is Technology?
What is technology? The word technology is made up of two root words—techne and logos. Both come from Ancient Greek. The first of these means “art, skill or craft,” while the second means “dialogue, discourse or study.” Techne is particularly concerned with human agency and artisanship--that which is applied to trades...
21Jul2016
New Options for High Availability using Hyper-V with Storage Spaces Direct (S2D)
Windows Server 2016 introduces a new feature called Storage Spaces Direct. Expanding on their existing software-defined storage technology, Microsoft now allows us to pool internal disks across multiple servers--meaning that you do not need to use a separate enclosure and extra cabling to enable a shared storage solution. Shared storage is required for...
18Jul2016
Windows Server 2016 Essentials Experience: Bug with alias addresses
You may or may not be aware that certain mailbox properties are exposed and configurable from the Windows Server Essentials Dashboard. For example, you can quickly add or edit alias SMTP addresses. If you didn't know it before, now you do! From the Users tab, select a user, View the account...
15Jul2016
How to create an Anonymous relay connector in Exchange 2016
Hey, somebody moved my cheese again... If you configured an anonymous relay connector in Exchange 2013, for example to allow scan-to-email from an MFP device or other on-premise application, you probably remember that you needed to choose "Frontend Transport" and "Custom." If you left it on Hub Transport, it would fail, since the binding...
14Jul2016
Remove SBS 2008 or SBS 2011 Source Server from the domain
Sorry Old Yeller--I know you were a faithful companion for many years--but it's time to put you down, buddy. I usually wait until the end of the migration project for this. There is no harm leaving the old server as-is for the duration of the project while you finish migrating file shares, DHCP, Remote Access...
11Jul2016
Migrating SBS Remote Web Access to Essentials Anywhere Access
In Windows Small Business Server environments, one of the more popular features to implement was the Remote Web Workplace (or Remote Web Access in 2011). The idea was to grant secure, web-based remote access to corporate resources (such as Remote Desktop or web-enabled access to Server Folders). In Windows Server 2012...
07Jul2016