Yesterday I told you about what I learned during the Small Business Server 2000 installation. Today I am going to tell you all of the wonderful problems I found during initial configuration and operation. My plan was to follow the example laid out in Harry Brelsford's fine book, Small Business Server 2000 Best Practices, and tweak it with info gathered from the SBS2K group on Yahoo. Here is what I learned.

1. To get my Windows XP client to work I had to clean out the hosts file. Since I reused my server name but used a new private address it was not finding the server.
2. To get my Windows 98 client to login into the exchange messenger server I had to add the DNS server to its network configuration.
3. I had to modify ISA to allow web proxy to work properly with http. I had to open the filter to any client request rather than the internet user group. This allowed Netscape and Quicken 2002 to work. I later found out that this affected Internet Explorer under Windows XP. Somehow the ISA configuration got screwed up and it went back to the default condition. The first place I noticed the problem was while using Internet Explorer under Windows XP. The browser would go to sleep on the second or third page. My W2K clients were fine. It took me a while because I thought it was a XP client problem.
4. Although a lot of people have reported problems with XP as a client(SBS2K group), I have not had their problems.
5. I continue to have several problems with Healthmon, Service Status screen, and performance monitoring. Several errors appear in the application log as coming from Perflib with event id of 1010 and 1008. I think W2K has a problem generating performance info from the processor and memory performance objects. I gather M$ knows about the problem and are working on it.
6. I installed HFNetChkLT from www.shavlik.com to check on patch status. I had to update to MDAC 2.7 to get it to work. When I ran a scan on the server it pointed out that SQL2000 SP2 had not been applied as I thought. I assumed that since SP2 was on the SBS2K service pack disk it was applied like the other service packs. I applied the service pack and it cleaned up a few more application log errors and took me back to MDAC 2.6.
7. I had to install a Time Sync packet filter in ISA so the server would sync up the time.
8. I had to use HELLO versus EHELLO to retrieve email from AT&T Worldnet. I am dumping all the mail into one mailbox. The preferred method is to let Exchange manage the mail addresses but I had other problems I needed to work on.
9. I fixed the DNS forwarders twice. I started getting event id 506 so I had to configure a second time. I don't know how it got removed.