JeremyP's Blog

For some strange reason, we decided to get Microsoft Small Business Server to support our business infrastructure. Well actually, we thought to get the equivalent functionality using Open Source prodiucts or other alternatives would take several days of me hacking around with a Linux box. Whereas with a Dell Small Business Server (costing the reasonable price of around £2,000) we could just plug it in, enter some config information and we'd be up and running.

Well, the first problem was that the server that turned up was not in a rack mountable case which makes it a huge pain to put in a rack. Never mind blame the person who ordered the kit.

By 11am I had configured the thing (Dell had already installed the OS) and put the eight critical patches that Microsoft suggested (quite a lot of this time was spent sorting out network connectivity). I was now ready for SQL Server. Where shall I put it? How about this 500 Gigabyte D drive? Hang on - where did 500 Gigabytes come from?

Unfortunately, the two 250 Gigabyte disks were configured as RAID 0 i.e. as one big blob using all the disk space. The reason we ordered two disks was so we could mirror them. There was nothing else to do but wipe the installation and start from scratch. Actually from less than scratch, I had to wipe out the good work done by the Dell boys. It appears that the person who ordered the kit forgot to tick the box that said "please mirror my disks". That took the rest of the day and interestingly there were now 16 critical patches to install.

Now all I have to do is learn about Active Directory, yay!