I guess I am going to be the only SMB blogger not to say anything about SBS or EBS this week, wherever the Koolade was spiked I sure wasn’t around to drink it.

Microsoft Windows 2003 will be the last version of Small Business Server that Own Web Now offers en-masse.

Too big for smallbiz..

This was a strict business decision for us as an organization not to support Microsoft’s “integration” server projects because of the changing demands by the marketplace. On the low end, which finds SBS the most appealing, we are seeing budget crunches leaving customers with file servers and cloud hosting.

Too limiting for complex smb…

On a slightly more complex environments, we consider SBS a liability to our ability to get customers to grow at the pace and in the direction that they need to. Getting tangled up in wizardry limits an SBS clients ability to scale out components seamlessly - something that has cost us dearly with Exchange 2007’s introduction. Most clients that wanted Exchange 2007 were forced to wait because there was no quick way to rip out Exchange 2003 from SBS. Same with SharePoint v3, moving the team site from SBS to standalone was not easy.

SBS simplicity comes at a greater cost than its complexity..

The cost of migrating off SBS is far higher than the initial license savings and the setup costs. Since we are the ones designing, deploying, managing and integrating these solutions in the SMB we do not benefit from the benefits SBS brings to people that are not server admins. Our upcoming framework gives us central management of all assets, systems and configurations so the quirky ways in which SBS is setup (Transition Pack ring a bell) are far too costly.

For example, my team can have a full Exchange 2007 deployment completed within the hour. By comparison, a swing migration can take far more than that involving a lot more touches.

Solution sales, not product sales..

Going forward, we’re putting our might behind solutions and benefits, not products. Even in a limited choice of solutions SBS was not a very recognizable brand. With the new world of cloud everything, Google this, Zimbra that and so on we’re opting to sell on benefits and we felt more confident in our ability to deliver them on Windows 2008 server than SBS

It’s not about the price..

Complex small and midmarket environment is not very price sensitive. If they are, I can kill anyone with a hosted proposal and if thats what they want, thats what we provide.

SBS 2008 pricing is delicious, I will give them that, but our customers do not happen to be price sensitive. We are. Bulk of our project work is in midmarket and enterprise and there seemed to be very little in the SBS to make us want to train staff on it when we can just use the solutions SBS was built on. So we don’t get every trinket available, life goes on, in the long term we expect our cost of moving and growing off 2008 Standard, Enterprise and Virtualized to be far, far less than what they were with 2000, 2003 and our final move - to 2008.

….

I expect Susan to write a retraction to this and pick apart each point bit by bit as if it wasn’t made by someone who is responsible for thousands of Windows servers and runs a business aware of which parts of the products make money and which ones are losers I’m not discouraging the use of SBS, just explaining why I (or we) feel that the opportunity for our company and cost to our partners is more beneficial with 2008 servers than SBS and EBS. If you are interested in looking anyhow, David has the best review of SBS 2008 so far.

The other day I wrote about Zappos.com giving “$1K offer to quit” to someone that worked there for a week to test their loyalty to the company. Last night, I watched a full 60 minutes segment on the “Millennials” and frankly I found the whole piece very disturbing. I also found it far-fetched, nothing like the college students I interact with. One particularly bothersome excerpt:

“It is no longer a problem to have four jobs on your resume during the past year.”

“I can go down the street and they will treat me better and probably pay me more money.”

The generation of instant gratification is here. But man does it have a rude awakening ahead of it. First, I always like to look at who the bitch is (see Vlad vs. Microsoft) and who needs who more. In the coming superstorm of elitist entitled entry level employees, how much of their roles will be pushed towards automation and third world markets where people would love a job?

Second, the expectation that the grass is greener on the other side is in a direct conflict with the entrepreneurs sense of investment. Let us for the moment assume that the millennials are more technically savvy and demand a high starting wage. Let us also assume they work a job in the technology service arena, where the retraining is all but required every two years. Who is paying for the training?  That’s right, I am. And guess who gets the training, who gets the conference passes, etc? The people who have my best interest in heart, not just their own.

If you think you can only think about yourself and sustain your skills for the salary you wish, you need to show both loyalty and sacrifice. Either we’re both investing in each other or the exploitation is the name of the game.

“I have been told I am special, why should I sacrifice for the company and give it my all? I don’t want to wait for it, I want it now.”

Fantastic thinking. McDonalds commercial, right? Well, prepare to work there.

During 90’s McDonalds ran tons of commercials about getting what you want, NOW! And some apparently made this a chosen lifestyle.

The problem with that is that they likely also saved exactly $0 if not dug deep in debt. Guess what happens with your salary bargaining power, ability to switch employers, relocate, train for the new role or take a new contract when you’re up to your eyeballs in your instant gratification bills?

It doesn’t work like that. You are not special. You are not smarter.

You’re gullible. The business world does not tolerate quitters and slackers, it does not reward the path of least resistance, it does not embrace the Hakuna Matata you saw in the cartoons.

Yesterday’s article is really bringing a lot of attention, glad you liked it. To be honest, I am still very involved in the technical side of Own Web Now, especially the new generation of products, but I have stopped blogging about them because they brought in far too much tech support via email form that said “don’t email me your tech support issues, take them to Microsoft newsgroups”; But since Exchange 2007 won’t be touched by SBSers for quite some time I can talk about it without fear.

A while back someone said they would pay to have me teach about how I work this stuff, particularly the troubleshooting, deployment and management. I played it off politely and modestly, very much unlike vladville.com, but the reason why you don’t see these kinds of presentations in SMB and the reason you will not see these kinds of technical presentations in the SMB space is that at their very core they are both too simplistic and too complex for the audience. Contradiction? Not really. Most of this stuff is very simple once you know the basics and know where to look for.

Let me take you through the thinking process step by step, yesterdays post for example:

First, I checked the site through the web browser. This told me that the web server works, that the domain did not expire, that the DNS is properly pointed at the server. This effort took all of five seconds, but it did not send me down a path of troubleshooting a problem that does not exist. For example, there is no need to restart IIS - if it gave you an error code that means its working so you need to check its logs or App/System log for errors.

Second, usual suspects. Check that stores are mounted, check that the app pools are started, general service checks.

Third, event log - what is causing the actual problem. This is time consuming exactly once. That first time you realize what the problem is, what the solution is and how it gets solved.

That is so simplistic that it would take two minutes to explain, but if you were an SBSer and didn’t know the basics and just pushed wizards over and over this would be a 6 day overview covering everything from how the Internet works all the way to registering ASP.NET correctly.

Anyhow, I just wanted to offer an explanation for why you’re not seeing in-depth technical training in SMB — the basics are far too complex for beginners and the solutions are, dare I say it, obvious to anyone that understands the basics.

Funny how that is all that separates people making teens per hour as opposed to six figures a year, eh?

So Howard emails me yesterday about a problem he’s been trying to figure out. His Outlook Web Access 2007 on the Exchange 2007 installation suddenly stopped working. Nothing changed

There are many reasons why Outlook Web Access 2007 will give you the “Service Unavailable” error message, mostly because the mail/public databases are not running, something you will be able to quickly determine from the Event Viewer. However, this one was slightly different. This event viewer generated the following error message, with event code 2268:

Event ID: 2268
Raw Event ID : 2268
Record Nr. : 3746
Source: W3SVC-WP
Category: None
Type : Error
Machine : ACISERVER2
Description:
Could not load all ISAPI filters for site/service. Therefore startup aborted.

Event ID: 2274
Raw Event ID : 2274
Record Nr. : 3745
Source: W3SVC-WP
Category: None
Type : Error
Machine : ACISERVER2
Description:
ISAPI Filter ‘C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_filter.dll’ could not be loaded due to a configuration problem. The current configuration only supports loading images built for a AMD64 processor architecture. The data field contains the error number. To learn more about this issue, including how to troubleshooting this kind of processor architecture mismatch error, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=29349.

Confirm it, restart IIS and you will see the following error:

Basically, you (or the software you were installing) switched your IIS site where OWA is installed into either a 32bit mode or ASP.NET 1.1. Since Exchange 2007 Outlook Web Access 2007 only runs on ASP.NET 2.0 in 64bit mode, you need to fix it back.

First, disable the 32bit mode for your web site. By default OWA goes into the Default Web Site context (0) so the following will take care of that:

cscript C:\inetpub\adminscripts\adsutil.vbs SET W3SVC/AppPools/Enable32bitAppOnWin64 0

Second, register ASP.NET 2.0 as the default framework for that web site:

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727>
aspnet_regiis.exe -i
Start installing ASP.NET (2.0.50727).
……………………………….
Finished installing ASP.NET (2.0.50727)

Restart IIS and you should be all set.

Remember, you have to be careful with third party software deployments and IIS on the 64bit platform. Before you do your rollouts create the web site for it, put it in its own worker group. If you allow it to do its own deployment it will usually go into the Default Web Site, DefaultAppPool and you’ll be reading this blog post again. Also remember that just because the software says it’s 64bit it doesn’t mean all the components of it (like web control panels) are 64bit as well.

In this case, it was Symantec AV that did it.

Also, I write technical articles on weekends so that Damian Leibaschoff can score a few hours of overtime. Time to give brother a raise…

Dave asks in my WHS Unplugfest post if hating Mac’s is a religious bigotry:

Why are you turning your nose at something that a) works and b) does what you want. That’s religious bias…

He is right. AntiMacFanboism is a religious decision but I think it has more merit than the MacFanBoism where hordes of people line up for no reason at all to buy a device just because of its design. When confronted, they always compare their current Apple Experience with the crashing and blue screens of Windows 98. Yes, “It Just Works” because you have no choice but to run anything but the Apple software and when you try the other options they crash just as ugly as they do on Windows.

My AntiMacFanboism stems from tying software to their overpriced hardware and trying to lock content down to their software. No ability to legally use Mac OS X on a system that can hold 4-6 hard drives in a single chasis with my choice of RAID controller makes MacOS X absolutely useless to me. I don’t buy music on iTunes because I cannot move those songs to other devices. That, IMHO, is moving backwards, not forwards. It doesn’t matter how pretty your device is if you can’t swap the extra battery on your own on a long trip.

I’m not saying that Apple hasn’t done a great job of creating the baseline applications that most people use and dumbed them down to the core so that anyone can be immediately productive without problems — what I am saying is that everyone I know that exists even an inch off that computer newbie level is virtualizing Windows on top of their Mac anyhow. So what’s the logic there, pay for an overpriced Apple device and virtualize Vista/XP just because Vista/XP didn’t perform marvelously on your underpriced/underpowered Dell?

It’s not like I’m a naive Mac basher, I have two Mac’s in my office and use it every day, so far, nobody has been able to clearly and eloquently demonstrate to me that Mac is better on equivalent hardware.

It’s all the huge gaping unreasonable holes in what Apple delivers that really hold me back from taking them seriously as a platform. At the end of the day, they are both trash. For example, “just works” doesn’t apply to our Apple G4 iMac in the front office. It came without a wireless card so we bought a third party one from Dlink. It blows. It’s unstable. The iMac is visually stunning, but it’s CD no longer works. It has spots on the screen.

See, it goes both ways. Both are broken. AntiMacFanboism side is just more affordable, more versatile and on the OS merits alone more relevant since most of the other religion virtualizes out religion to begin with.

Long weekend is upon us, it’s computer project time.

With Windows Home Server out of picture and unplugged I’m left to search for something more reliable. What is popular out there? I’d prefer it have some sort of an Xbox connectivity to it but am not that picky if it doesn’t.

So far I have checked out LinuxMCE, XBMC for Linux and a few others but so far XBMC seems to be the boss. Just gorgeous. There is of course just installing a copy of Vista Ultimate but that seems too ungeeky.

My requirements - ability to store system backups, pictures / slideshows, remote access to pictures and video and the ability to be easily backed up for offsite/secure storage. Oh, and not corrupting files on a file server, that would be just fantastic.

(if you say Mac Mini, so help me god, I will hunt you down and kill you)

So the other night Tim and I were hanging out watching the NBA playoffs and bringing Lucy Exchange online and my wife walked in on the following scene:

So, is the addiction to pornography a genetically dominant trait? It would appear so.

I’ve got 29 years on the kid and I’ve only progressed as far as getting rid of the diaper. It’s not as if that is some huge plus to begin with.

The look on my wifes face when she realized we’ve made another copy of me…. priceless.

  Had a hard day… hard day that got fixed by a Hurricane. Phew. Here is something to brighten up your day in return:

For my buddy Dave:

And of course, who can miss out on the pride of the Blue & Orange:

Ta na na na na…. Go Gators.. Bzzt.

… and they will build a better idiot.

Honestly, there are days when I feel like people do things with my software just to dick with me. For years we didn’t enforce password complexity on ExchangeDefender, ergo 99.999% of the passwords at ExchangeDefender are “password”, “Password”, “Password1″, “P@55w0rd“, “P@ssw0rd“, “password123″, “1qa2ws” or “2ws3ed” and can be cracked by a three year old.

So I set out to write a password complexity procedure the other day, enforcing the standard MCSE complexity: at least 7 in length with the mix of three of the four options: lowercase char, uppercase char, integer, special character. So today I power on my laptop to see just how complex the passwords being generated are, thinking that people are starting to use passphrases, etc.

What I found made me scream out “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccckkk me, WHY!?$!@#” out loud. The password?

Abcd1234

Why, for the love of god, would anyone do that? Did they just look at the new password complexity alert and thought…

“Screw Vlad. What is the LEAST complex password I can come up with given the current restraints. Let’s see… how do I make this work… something everyone uses…. something sequential… start it at the beginning of that sequence. Oh, and I’ll capitalize the A for take that complexity Vlad, you Asshole.”

Thanks… whoever that was (anonymously logged)… I think my next method will check for password complexity and instead of throwing an alert or UAC or any of that annoying stuff that they can live with I will shoot back a 4096/1024bit key as their new password. “Dear Customer, The password you requested did not meet our password complexity requirements. Here is a 4096 char password to use from now on.”

Or sell them AuthAnvil….

I just don’t get it. Why spend all this money on perimeter security and protect it with a sequential password that can be guessed by a 3 year old?

Read this article earlier today and it just blew my mind. It talks about the importance of corporate culture, values and giving your customers a reliable feeling when they work with your company:

So when Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. People get paid their full salary during this period.

After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!

Why? Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for. It’s hard to describe the level of energy in the Zappos culture—which means, by definition, it’s not for everybody. Zappos wants to learn if there’s a bad fit between what makes the organization tick and what makes individual employees tick—and it’s willing to pay to learn sooner rather than later. (About ten percent of new call-center employees take the money and run.)

We work in the exact opposite way - raise or fire - within 90 days, and I have to admit that the above does look better. My primary Office Space problem in growing OWN is that the experience is definitely not consistent because there is a personality tradeoff in hiring - I can hire someone social or someone technically savvy, but we generally don’t find both, so we have hordes of people that likely go home and work on their roadkill taxidermy projects for all I know. IT customer is not exactly the “people person” nurturing system, 99% of the time you’re dealing with some asshole who also gets kept in a dark, moist basement rarely exposed to sunlight much less people.

Wonder what it takes to raise socially presentable IT employees?