Well today was the first day back at the office since the migration. Really things went more smoothly then anticipated. There were 5 machines left over that still needed to migrate: 2 were laptops that were out of the office, 3 were machines that the Active Directory Migration Tool was unable to migrate. Basically with all 5 we simply manually added them to the new domain and then copied the users profiles over, no big deal. So, all that being said, our office is now working on our new server with SBS 2k3.

Next on the “To Do” list, move the tape drive over and get the backup software installed. Then reformat the old server and turn it into our home drive. Both fairly easy jobs. Oh and then, I need to get back to my regular job of programming. We’ve got a new release coming up soon and the cut-off is in a week.

Question of the Day. How many hats do you where at work?

I’m still counting.

Our network is officially running on Small Business Server 2003. Got home at 5am this morning. I was at the office for nearly 8 hours. For the most part, things went ok. The biggest snag we ran into was the Active Directory Migration Tool and the migrating of the client computers from one server to the new server.

Of course, on paper this seemed like an easy task, but what the “white papers” failed to mention was that you couldn’t migrate all the machines in one step. When we selected all of the machines to migrate only 3 of them (at the most) would actually do it. The rest would fail. Then we had to run the migration tool again and get a few more machines over, and so on. That process, alone, took the better part of 3-4 hours when it probably should have taken, at the most, 1 hour.

Anyway, needless to say, I’m a bit tired now. I might go into some more detail on Monday (count on it). But, for now, I need to finish getting my house ready for my youngest daughter’s birthday party. (This should be a breeze on 3 hours of sleep)

Well, today is “Migration Day”. The plan is to come in to the office sometime around 9pm tonight and get it done. I have all the materials I need, unlike last week when I discovered I had forgotten to purchase our additional CALs that we needed.

So, wish me luck.

Well I finally got my Hard Drive Carrier Assemblies from Dell and went to add them into my new server that I installed SBS on. I found out that you can’t add more drives to a RAID 5 array without re-initializing the array, which means reformatting. So basically I’m back to Day 1.

Woo Hoo.

Well things were going great Friday night. I got DHCP up and running all the computers on the network were getting their IP addresses from the new server. I started working through the “To Do List” and realized, I hadn’t yet purchased the additional CALs we needed to run this server on our network yet…

WHOOPS.

Well, that brings us to today, I’m going to be calling CDW up and purchasing some CALs. Hopefully they can get me them by the end of the week so I can finish this migration on this coming Friday.

I came in this morning and completed the SBS 2k3 installation and installed Microsoft SQL Server on the machine. Now I have the “To Do List” to tackle, most of which I am not going to touch until tonight when I am ready for the actual Migration. That is when I expect some headaches, but we’ll see.

The crummy part is that I won’t have Internet access during the migration because I have to disconnect both the source and destination servers from the router. So, hopefully, this little migration doc that I found on Microsoft’s website will give me all the answers I will need. I’ve read it several times and it all seems fairly straight forward and since our office isn’t huge, I don’t expect it to take forever.

I’ll probably check back in later tonight either before or after to let everyone know how it went.

Well I’m into Disc 2 of the SBS 2k3 installation process… so far everything is going great. No surprises or snags, but then, I am just installing onto a brand new server, so what really could go wrong during this stage of the process…. Right? I’ll let you know when it is done.

So today I begin the process of migrating our Windows 2000 Server to Small Business Server 2003.

Boy am I looking forward to this.

I figure I could get a couple days of posting out of it and, who knows, logging it here may help someone else out in the future (unlikely). So for those posts related to this topic I am going to put SBS-2k3 in the title, so you know to skip over if you aren’t interested, however this may be amusing to read cause I anticipate some frustration in the near future.

EDIT: I decided not to put SBS-2k3 in the title, instead I just made it a Category.