No More SBS

[sugaris]

SBS = Small business server... When i think small business server i think 15 employees or less. I laugh at the fact people are bustings the limits of SBS. If u out grow SBS then move your shit to a full blown ad domain with an exchange or unix, linux or lotus notes or what tickles your IT fancy... It's a shame really that people out there put in SBS and then blame it when it cannot handle what they want.

I'll also say its hard enough for a small business to make money and have people then say oh move your shit to the cloud... If your saying that then You have no idea about small business. Every single cent you make goes to keeping their business alive and lets face it it puts food on their tables at night. They don't want to be giving it to Microsoft and Internet provides every month.

[darkanjel]

Originally Posted by NSanity

To be fair - there is a bunch of pissing around to not build a SBS 2011 domain with something other than .local (well you need to make an answer file...).

And .local was fine till Apple decided to break things, even then if you don't have OSX clients it really doesn't matter.

Best practice says to use an internet routable domain... if an engineer has a specific design reason not to do so, that's the engineer's call and they're probably not a cowboy. I'm referring to the guys that just do it because she'll be right.

Scalix is fucking shit. So is Zimbra. Go Cloud before you even bother with those - in every possible circumstance.

Absolutely, I'm 100% with emails for cloud. I'm referring to the remote offices that "require" an on-premise mail server and bank on SBS. As I've said here or in another thread, once you remove mail from SBS, it's really just file sharing, GP and logon (except extenuating circumstances), replace this with a simpler server or application.

[NSanity]

Originally Posted by IACSecurity

Link to current MS source pleasa.

Yeah i'm doubtful on this.

[darkanjel]

It's probably the number one hit in my bookmarks:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909264


Best practices

• If the organization has an Internet presence, use names that are relative to the registered Internet DNS domain name. For example, if you have registered the Internet DNS domain name contoso.com, use a DNS domain name such as corp.contoso.com for the intranet domain name.

• If you are deploying DNS in a private network, and you do not plan to create an external namespace, register the DNS domain name that you create for the internal domain. Otherwise, you may find that the name is unavailable if you try to use it on the Internet, or if you connect to a network that is connected to the Internet.

There are several good reasons for it and I am surprised you guys don't know this but hope you change your ways from here on

[NSanity]

Originally Posted by darkanjel

There are several good reasons for it and I am surprised you guys don't know this but hope you change your ways from here on

There is several reasons why you might not want to use a Internet routable domain as well.

Infact I'd say that on the whole, particularly for SMB, non-Internet DNS names are preferable. So long as you know the pro's and con's of both - things are ok.

[elvis]

Originally Posted by NSanity

Scalix is fucking shit. So is Zimbra. Go Cloud before you even bother with those - in every possible circumstance.

Curious to know what put you off Zimbra. I've rolled it out to a few places now, and it's akways been well received. Admittedly they were all small sites (<50 people per site, single domain, single site). I've heard in large, multi-site facilities it can get very administration-heavy.

[NSanity]

Originally Posted by elvis

Curious to know what put you off Zimbra. I've rolled it out to a few places now, and it's akways been well received. Admittedly they were all small sites (<50 people per site, single domain, single site). I've heard in large, multi-site facilities it can get very administration-heavy.

I last looked at it running against SBS 2003 (yeah its 6+ years ago). The Java client was slow and cumbersome (as bad as Outlook 2003 on the same hardware). A copy/paste effort to try and match Outlook 2003, which means that it was familiar enough to frustrate the hell out of you when you found something different.

We put it in for a client with 5 mailboxes because they didn't want to pay licensing costs - it lasted about 6 months before they went to SBS 2003 and were never heard from again.

I essentially made the decision to never bother looking at a mail setup that was trying to be "Exchange" ever again.

Several friends that i trust in IT have looked at FOSS Exchange "replacements" over the years after the incident. Scalix comes up from time to time and the company who sells support for it Australia always promises big things but it falls horribly short during Proof of Concept compared to 2003, let alone 2007/2010 - or something more (which is really how a competitor should try to win market share).

What we need is a locally installable "gmail" or similar, that just connects into Apache/nginx. Roundcube/Horde/Squirrel/etc all are horrendous compared to Hotmail/Yahoo mail of old - let alone GMail.

[elvis]

Originally Posted by NSanity

I last looked at it running against SBS 2003 (yeah its 6+ years ago). The Java client was slow and cumbersome (as bad as Outlook 2003 on the same hardware). A copy/paste effort to try and match Outlook 2003, which means that it was familiar enough to frustrate the hell out of you when you found something different.

It's definitely improved a lot in recent years, both in visual/design quality and performance.

But yeah, unless a client of mine has very specific privacy needs, I will also push them towards Google Apps these days. But as mentioned, I've got a few locations out there who are happily using Zimbra (smallest is about 15 users, biggest is 50).

[IACSecurity]

Originally Posted by darkanjel

It's probably the number one hit in my bookmarks:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909264


Best practices

• If the organization has an Internet presence, use names that are relative to the registered Internet DNS domain name. For example, if you have registered the Internet DNS domain name contoso.com, use a DNS domain name such as corp.contoso.com for the intranet domain name.

• If you are deploying DNS in a private network, and you do not plan to create an external namespace, register the DNS domain name that you create for the internal domain. Otherwise, you may find that the name is unavailable if you try to use it on the Internet, or if you connect to a network that is connected to the Internet.

There are several good reasons for it and I am surprised you guys don't know this but hope you change your ways from here on

Yeah that link doesn't really say what you seem to think it says...

I can think of several reasons for an internal namespace that's not publicly accessible, for reasons not covered by that link.

[elvis]

In Linux-land I've always kept my internal and external domain names identical, separated by "views" in ISC BIND.

I've been told it's risky in theory, even with my paranoid patching regime. No hacks yet, but that doesn't mean much.

[Iceman]

Using your ext domain name on internal dns is unnecessary and painful in most SMB's.

You're essentially splitting the name space across two DNS - one is your windows server and the other is the DNS server of your website provider.

Also, your local domain login becomes bobsbigbusinesswarehouse.com.au\bob ..

local domain - short and sweet so your fully logins are short bbws.lan\bob or something.

Btw the reason people are confused about this is MS has published it both ways over the years "use your internet domain name / no don't use your internet domain name, use .local".

[Annihilator69]

Originally Posted by darkanjel

If you are deploying DNS in a private network, and you do not plan to create an external namespace, register the DNS domain name that you create for the internal domain. Otherwise, you may find that the name is unavailable if you try to use it on the Internet, or if you connect to a network that is connected to the Internet.

Seams like it's mostly saying if you want to use a internal domain that's fine but register the 'real' one just incase you decide to use it on the web at a later date.
Also that it's best practice for the reason that using .local or .com.au might confuse people... So make it easy by just a singular TLD...

So no real 'technical' reasons to not to use .local but more touchy/feely reasons :P

[jastormont]

Originally Posted by Iceman

Btw the reason people are confused about this is MS has published it both ways over the years "use your internet domain name / no don't use your internet domain name, use .local".

I agree with you on that and I think this is why there are so many different opinions on the matter.

[elvis]

Originally Posted by Iceman

Using your ext domain name on internal dns is unnecessary and painful in most SMB's.

You're essentially splitting the name space across two DNS - one is your windows server and the other is the DNS server of your website provider.

I've always set up views in ISC BIND and hosted DNS myself (usually one locally, and one on a VPS somewhere). It works out pretty cost effective for an SMB.

[Iceman]

Originally Posted by elvis

I've always set up views in ISC BIND and hosted DNS myself (usually one locally, and one on a VPS somewhere). It works out pretty cost effective for an SMB.

Sure but we're talking about microsoft domains. Generally someone running a SBS isn't going to have a linux box or BIND doing DNS for them because that's a different skillset than the guy installing SBS.

Also getting AD to play happily with bind is not insurmountable but again probably not the skillset of theu guy installing SBS.

Also I think running your ext DNS on your unreliable SMB internet link is only a good idea IF you're doing something crazy with bind like that

Otherwise .. even the free zoneedit would be more reliable.