Microsoft Recalls Small Business Server

dasButcher writes to tell us VarBusiness is reporting that hot on the heels of many other delays, Microsoft has recalled their Small Business Server 2003 R2. The operating system started shipping to OEMs, distributors, and systems builders in July but was immediately recalled after a recent audit.

What's getting deleted? WinFS???

[jkrise]

Looks like WinFS got released as part of Small Biz Server... remember it was withdrawn from Vista, but was supposed to be packaged with SQL Server instead? My guess is that Small Biz Server will not have WinFS... customers will have to buy the separate SQL Servr most probably...

SBS made me quit my job...

[BinaryCodedDecimal]

Slightly off-topic, but SBS is the reason I changed my job. I leave this place at the end of the month, thank god. I support several companies, 10 of which are using SBS. It has to be the best way of putting all of a company's eggs in one basket. It goes against everything that makes good sense about creating an available, stable network with some redundancy. If you go for the Premium edition and install everything, you'll find yourself running: - Exchange - SQL Server - ISA Server - IIS - File/Print services - DNS - DHCP - WINS All on the same box which is ALSO a domain controller for your network. If that box fails (some of our clients are cheap enough to have declined a RAID solution, against better advice), then that's it... the whole place is down the toilet until the box is rebuilt, and you'd better pray that the backups are good. It's a horrible, horrible way of running things, IMHO. I'll be glad to not have to support these boxes any more.

humm

[crashelite]

no wonder why the server never worked. it was still in beta. i wonder what will happen to vista now?

Re:SBS made me quit my job...

[airxdata]

In all honesty, I can't fault SBS for the problems that you are experiencing here. The reason that SBS puts all their eggs in one basket is because, in the case of many small businesses, they can only afford that one basket. In your case, it looks like your problems stem from selling only half a basket for those eggs. I administer about 30 - 35 SBS boxes and haven't had a problem with them yet, but we also only do jobs where we can put this on a real server machine. SBS is actually an incredible product. At the moment, there are very few items on the market that can compete with it. If there is something to compete with it, there are very few consultants out there that can actually SUPPORT it as well as this can be. The price point for SBS is simply amazing and the features that come with it, like Remote Web Workplace, are fantastic. If you call MS Product Support Services and tell them what you're running those SBS installs on, they'll probably laugh. Remember, do things right or don't do them at all. Setting it up like that will only cause you more headaches, which you're now seeing.

Re:SBS made me quit my job...

[ericlondaits]

I work at a small company. We don't have a full time sys admin (I do the chores myself, while also working as a programmer). We have a single Linux server that runs:
- SMTP
- POP
- DNS
- Apache (hosting mediawiki, mantis, dotproject, phpMyAdmin)
- MySQL (for the mentioned web apps)
- A SAMBA fileserver
- DHCP

The only thing that's not in that server is the firewall... which I kept in a different machine with no services running whatsoever, except those that handle our aDSL connection (pppoe, and sshd to connect from inside the LAN).

Our setup is not great on redundancy... but we can afford a couple of days of downtime (we had to, once or twice over the years) more than we can afford doubling our setup. Our services are used by a small number of employees (six, actually) and none are critical.

If Microsoft wants to pull us away from Linux they'd have to offer a Windows Server with all they usual servers (like those you mentioned), even if they're somewhat limited to prevent being used in a large corporation (max database size, max number of clients, etc.), priced appropiately for the use we'd give it. This product sounds like what we'd need... despite some companies misusing it for some reason.

Legal precedent?

[vhogemann]

I know it wasn't sent to any actual customers, but...

One can imagine, if given any serious fault or bug, Microsoft would be obligated to recall copies of their OS. Given that nowdays the OS is a crucial component for several business, can the justice force Microsoft to do it?

After all, if they sell a defective product, that can cause severe harm to its consumers... I guess it's Microsof responsability to fix the damage. I don't know about the USA, but here at Brazil the EULA means nothing, since it can't deny any rights given to the consumer by the constitution or by federal laws.

Re:SBS made me quit my job...

[jimicus]

Linux can be done - I know of at least one company in the area that does it. They don't sell it as Linux; they sell it as an "entire IT system in a box for solicitors".

You would have to streamline everything a lot though:

- The customer isn't expected to do anything with the server. That's the support companies job (this isn't a million miles away from how a lot of these places work anyhow, so that's not a big deal).
- Installation is nailed down to "insert CD, turn system on". All the configuration is pre-done by the support company, and every customer gets the same configuration. The customer doesn't do the install anyhow, the company sends someone to site if necessary, but the fact that everything is already nailed down means that you could get away with shaving a chimpanzee, putting them in a shirt and tie and sending them out to site.
- Server hardware is specified (and usually supplied by) the support company.
- Desktops aren't heavily locked down, but are locked down enough to minimise the likelihood of someone completely hosing their system. Combine that with Ghost, and running as much as possible from the server, and the desktop support overhead almost evaporates.

You could easily charge £a few thousand per company per annum doing this - for the customer, it's a lot cheaper than paying a fulltime IT person when they probably only need a couple of man days a month, and gives them peace of mind.

Re:Non-final?

[CastrTroy]

Maybe they released it and then realized that one of the components contained GPL'd code. They couldn't very well issue a patch to get rid of it, because, if you didn't patch, then you would still be running the code. Also MS could be held accountable for releasing the code whether or not they issued a patch or not.

What bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, what kind of bullshit is this? If it was a routine check, this would have have been trapped before delivery, no?

Pure bullshit and spindoctoring.

Yeah, they're a big fish

[Colin Smith]

MS is big, *slow* and competing against people who can give their products away for free. My question is where are all the sharks taking advantage of this?

 

Re:where did you read that?

[NSIM]

> No one has still replied to my request for an explanation of >what non-final core components mean. Is this the same as bugs? Just a guess, but I would suspect that somewhere in the process of going from RC candidate to RTM somebody screwed up so that the final version passed by QA and the version that went to manufacturing were not the same. So probably means that it's a few builds short of what should have gone to manufacturing and reflects the product at a very late stage in the release process.

Re:SBS made me quit my job...

[b0s0z0ku]

A lot of the places that run SBS have no full time IT staff. With SBS they get an out-of-the box file server, domain controller, exchange server. There's a risk it may blow up and they'll lose those things, but for most of these places the alternative is not to have them in the first place.

Speaking as a freelance IT consultant, SBS servers, esp those which haven't been imaged initially for quick restoration after everything is working right and which have been running for a few years are a *fucking disaster* to manage. Nothing is transparent, and when something b0rks, you often have to resort to downloading random patches from MS and hoping they'll work.

Most small businesses need a file server, possibly a mail/calendar server, maybe a domain controller (actually, one-login-per-machine isn't horrible IMHO), maybe a VPN server, a DNS server, a DHCP server, a VPN gateway and a print server. All of which can be handily be accomplished with a net-installed Debian system in 5 or 6 hours. Assuming a consultant charging $70/hr, that's $350-420.

Then pay a few hundred a year for a consultant to manage the server remotely via SSH. Small price to pay for a quality server, or at least my clients seem to think so.

-b.

Re:I feel your pain

[b0bby]

I've been running SBS 2000 as an Exchange/file server for over 3 years now, and I have to say it's really not bad for a small business. It saved us about $5000 in licensing compared to W2K Server/Exchange, and it gets restarted for patches, that's it. Properly set up, on decent hardware, it's certainly not "flakey". I looked into all the open source alternatives at the time, and I still feel that SBS & Exchange was the right choice, even with the ridiculous 16gb db limit. In fact, I still don't feel that there is an acceptable alternative today, which I find amazing. Mail is fine, but calendar features are very important here & there's just nothing to beat Outlook & Exchange. I run open source as much as I can, but I'm also a pragmatist.

At least they recall it!

[pe1chl]

The first issue went out with the defect documented in KB835734, for which a critical fix should have went out immediately!
But nothing was done except providing a nearly nonvisible update, and this issue has caused nearly untamable mailstorms damaging customer reputation, ringing up traffic bills, and causing lots of grief. At least they demonstrated that not everyone can write a fetchmail clone.

The typical customer for this package has no means at all to point out what was happening, and the system integrators usually only come by to look maybe the next day or so.
(when they tried remote access over the same internet connection, it would be stuffed with traffic)

At least now they recall it before it is too late.