Tuesday, December 16, 2008

SMB Conference Call: Eriq Neale - SBS 2008 Unleashed

Join me and Eriq Neale on Wed. Dec. 17th at 9:00 AM Pacific / 12 Noon Eastern as we discuss his newly-minted book

Small Business Server 2008 Unleashed, published by SAM's.

(Aside: I thought I'd announced this on the blog already. It has been in my SMB Email for weeks, so I somehow didn't get it posted here. If you want the latest info on what's happening, you gotta subscribe to that weekly email.)

In addition to this gem, Eriq is the author of SBS 2003 Unleashed.

This book thumps the table at about 780 pages. It includes all the sections you'd expect, introducing features and some great how-to tips. But it has plenty of surprises as well, including great information about working with McIntosh computers in the SBS environment.

In case you're wondering, McIntosh computers are a side product made by Apple, best known for their MP3 players.


Eriq Neale is an internationally-recognized Small Business Server expert and has been a Microsoft MVP since 2005.

He is the owner of EON Consulting, a small business technology consulting practice in Denton, Texas, and a partner in Third Tier, an organization that provides escalation support for IT organizations around the globe.

In addition to being the lead author for Windows Small Business Server 2008 Unleashed and the previous version, Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 Unleashed, his other writing credits include contributions to The Internet Unleashed 1997, Windows 2000 Server System Administrator's Handbook, E-mail Virus Protection Handbook and several books in both the 2000 and 2003 series MCSE exam preparation series.


Our topic will cover all things SBS 2008.

Please plan to join us.

We'll try to take questions by chat. Not sure how many we'll get in, but it should all be good.

Register Now
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/497575374

:-)

7 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:02 AM

    Interesting webcast today, thanks. Do you mind elaborating on your comment that you always do NIC teaming on SBS? What benefits/advantages do you see, what issues have come up, do you run Spanning Tree on your switch, etc?

    Thanks.

    Ed

    ReplyDelete
  2. There are only three things you need to know about NIC teaming on SBS 2003, and I could be talked out of the third:

    1) You'll get a nice improvement in network speed. Teamed NICs nearly double throughput if you have a good switch (NOT an $80 piece of junk). SBS views them as a single NIC and performs very nicely.

    2) UN-team the NICs when you run the Internet Connection wizard. Otherwise, you'll break stuff. Windows O.S. uses one MAC address to address the teamed NICs and you'll confuse the wizard. Re-team after you run the Wizard and all is good.

    3) The alike the NICs are, the better. This is 90% superstition from twenty years of experience where this kind of thing used to matter a lot more than it does today. Still, we use identical NICs just because. Using two ports on a 2- or 4-port NIC works fine.

    We have not run spanning tree on the switch. We just team NICs on Server 2003, Server 2008, SBS 2003, and now SBS 2008.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Do you make any settings on the switch ? Does creating a VLAN / Trunking on the switch help load sharing in the opposite direction ?

    What IP do you give the UN-teamed NIC, vs IP for the team ?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Do you set VLAN / Trunking on the switch ?

    How do you set the IP's on the Un-teamed NIC's and then on the teamed virtual NIC ?
    eg currently have a static 192.168.1.1 on the NIC, which is referred to by DNS etc.

    ReplyDelete
  5. This is really simple and you should just try it on your own system.

    Once you team the NICs, they have the personality of one of the physical NICs, including IP address.

    So switches are no confused.

    No need to create vlans or anything like that. You just get (about) twice the speed. Very simple.

    But remember to run any network-related wizards after the nics are teamed.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I'm getting confused....
    A: "But remember to run any network-related wizards after the nics are teamed."

    B: "UN-team the NICs when you run the Internet Connection wizard. Otherwise, you'll break stuff..Re-team after you run the Wizard and all is good."

    Arent these statements opposite ?

    I currently have ISA with 2 using internal broadcom Gb nics.(LAN+WAN). Thinking of adding an intel 10/100 as WAN and then teaming the broadcoms as LAN.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Sorry.

    Process is:

    1) Un-team NICs if they're teamed

    2) Run Internet Connection Wizard

    3) Team NICs

    The key to success is that you shouldn't run the wizard with the NICs teamed.

    ReplyDelete

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