dacs.doc electric

Our esteemed editor, Allan Ostergren, suggested this name for my column. We’ll see if it sticks. In the meantime, Allan gets his pick of any book in the DACS Library. More on this later.

DACS Website Committee
Just about all of the work on the DACS web site redesign has taken place in Anna Collens’ Web Design SIG. In June, this seemed to have scared off many of the regular attendees at her SIG. Be not afraid! You will not be roped into doing work on the DACS web site unless you really want to help. In last month’s episode we found a cool way for the SIG leaders to update a special page for their SIG that lets them work outside Dreamweaver while still retaining all the benefits of the Dreamweaver templates. This technique could be used on any web site where multiple people need to update small amounts of information on a set of web pages.

Home Network Upgrade
Those of you who know me understand that my ‘home network’ is far from typical. I like to learn about the technologies that I sell or support for my customers in the relative comfort of my home office. My little network started with some thin ethernet coax running down the hall (see “Home Networking and the WAF”, DACS.doc, Dec., 2000). It grew to the point that I moved the servers (currently only three) down to the basement to reduce the heat in my office. The software I run is equally extreme. I first set up Microsoft Exchange Server for email several years ago when programming a ‘tracking system’ for a client. Exchange would become a searchable database for all of the documents they produced. In the meantime, I got hooked on the advantages of running my own email server. For quite a few years now, I’ve been running Exchange Server 5.5, which Microsoft has “obsoleted.” This machine was also my NT4 domain controller when I first installed Exchange. Later I upgraded the machine to Windows 2000 Server but the fact that Exchange 5.5 will not run on Windows Server 2003 meant that it was time to bite the bullet and migrate to Exchange 2003, the current version, running on the Server 2003 operating system.

This truth arrived almost two years ago. First, I bought a new machine, as the old server was getting somewhat long in the tooth. The new machine is from Vision Computers–not exactly a household name– but it has a SuperMicro system board running dual AMD Athlons. It has a Gig of RAM and mirrored SATA disks. It’s definitely not a top line “enterprise-grade” machine, but it will serve (no pun) me well. After a BIOS update and two or three installs of Windows Server 2003, I had a stable platform for the migration. This part of the process consumed about one year. Being busy doing other things made it easy to procrastinate on the Exchange migration.

The first step was to accumulate a few books. When we upgraded the DACS Resource Center server to 2003, I recommended a group of books on XP and Server 2003. The key book is Mastering Windows Server 2003 by Mark Minasi, et. al. (Sybex, 2003). I still feel this is the best overall book on Windows Server 2003, as it covers setup, configuration of all of the software on the CD. Naturally, it does not cover Exchange. In large corporations, entire groups of people base their careers on installing and managing Microsoft Exchange, so naturally, another book was needed. Here I settled on Mastering Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 by Barry Gerber (Sybex, 2003), after an extensive session browsing through many books at Borders. This book has also proven to be an excellent choice. I also found extensive articles on Exchange migration in the Microsoft Knowledge Base. The KB is always one of my first stops when I have a problem as it contains thousands of articles and has a “Microsoft-style” search facility. Reading the Exchange book as well as every magazine article I could find left me even more intimidated than when I first started. While searching the KB I found a book-sized volume called the “Exchange Server Deployment Guide”. This online help file is extremely detailed, and even has step-by-step procedures for when the going gets really tough.

Why is this so difficult? Well, the problem is that there is no way to simply install the new software over the old stuff. This is called an “in place” upgrade, and this is what you normally do when you buy a new version of Office or Quicken. For a variety of reasons, like the operating system limitations, moving from Exchange 5.5 to 2003 must be done as a migration–that is, you must have both systems running side by side and then transfer the user information and mailboxes from the old platform to the new one. Since Microsoft really wants large companies to do this (rather than moving to some email system on Linux), they have provided tools to make the process tolerable. For really big companies, there are several third-party systems that provide truly extensive (and expensive) assistance. Given that I really have only one mailbox to move (mine), I sat down to learn how to use the tools provided by Microsoft.

My first task was to make the new server my domain controller. This was almost trivial. Running ‘dcpromo.exe’ from the command line starts the process of installing Active Directory (AD). AD was introduced in Windows 2000 Server and is Microsoft’s repository of all user and network information within a Windows domain (not the same as an Internet domain). This includes everything from user logon accounts and passwords, to printer locations, and all manor of business organization information. If used to the max, AD can be both the “white pages” and “yellow pages” for a very large enterprise. Since I will have only one AD server, all of the various AD functions must be forced to the new 2003 machine. Naturally, there is a utility to do that. Once I was sure the new server could authenticate logons, I could ‘demote’ the old server to “member server” status.

Logically, you might think the next step is to install Exchange 2003 on the new machine. Well, you would be wrong. I sure am glad I didn’t try to do this when Exchange Server 2003 was first introduced. The people in those pioneer companies had to learn much of this from scratch with minimal help from Microsoft. Ever wonder where all those Knowledge Base articles come from? They are written by the top tier Microsoft support engineers after someone calls with a new problem. After a couple of engineers stumble through the same problem, they combine their notes and write an article! These articles are not made public right away, and sometimes the only way to get one is for the engineer to send it to you.

Next month we’ll finish the migration. Those of you who want to stay in suspense until the end can skip to the end of this paragraph. After three weeks and several calls from a very frustrated Microsoft support specialist in an un-named country on the Asian sub-continent, I’m still not quite finished with the migration. However, Exchange Server 2003 has been sending and receiving my email for two solid weeks with no real trouble. How I first came to call Microsoft Support and how the “support incident” progressed will all unfold next month. With almost all of my clients running Windows Small Business Server 2003, which includes Exchange Server 2003, my new setup will now mirror my clients nicely.

The News
There has been so much going on in the last two months that directly affects your digital rights and civil liberties (not to mention the environment, your pension, etc., etc.) that I don’t know where to start. There is so much that I’ve already run out of space. I can only hope that you have called, emailed or written to your Congress People to let them know how you feel. The renewal of the Patriot Act is probably the most significant, and with the coming changes in the Supreme Court, protecting your rights will probably not become any easier.

Jim Scheef is no longer DACS president.

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