Windows 2003 SBS And Vista Gotchas

Well, my company got a Windows 2003 Small Business Server and most of our workstations were running Windows Vista. Now I ran into some issues I thought I'd document for the benefit of those attempting connections of Vista Business and up workstations to a Windows 2003 Small Business Server:

Windows 2003 Small Business Server Vista and Outlook 2007 Compatibility Upgrade

Before you throwing your Vista clients at your Windows 2003 Small Business Server, you're going to need to make sure you have the Windows Vista and Outlook 2007 compatibility update as outlined by KB926505, the knowledge base entry on Vista and Windows 2003 SBS. This will require a restart of the server to fully apply the effects of the patch.

Updating workstations with existing users

Now, you add your users through the Server Management tool, and it tells you to run [url]on the client workstation to setup the process. Before you do this, you need to separate out your systems with existing users (and thus profiles) and your systems with no established users. For the ones that have existing users, you'll need to install a Win32_UserProfile WMI patch. If you don't apply this patch, then you can't migrate your local PC user settings to the Windows 2003 SBS associated user when you run the setup (Unless you install the patch, then re-run the wizard).

Running the connection wizard

Okay, so let's say your server is named SBS2003, now you point your client workstation to [url]and you'll be asked for the username and password of an existing user on the Windows 2003 SBS. Enter it in and 2 things can happen:

Runs without a hitch

You get an error about copying Client Setup files

Now here's the painful one. There's a number of ways to approach this issue, so be sure to go through them all:

Point your DNS servers to the Windows 2003 SBS and ONLY the Windows 2003 SBS. This solved my particular issue.

You may have an issue with required encryption in IIS. See this post for a possible solution.

You may have an issue with TCP offload. Check this post for more information. Basically you need to disable it.

IIS is bound to a specific IP. Try changing it to "All Unassigned" instead.

Now then, the wizard should run, and your workstation should now be latched onto the domain Not quite done yet though.

Network Discovery

I found my workstations couldn't see network machines after I attached them to the network. Trying to turn on Network Discovery in the Network Sharing Center seemed to fail. To rectify this, I took 2 steps:

Enabled Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD) for the domain to get my network map. You'll also need to make sure LLTD is enabled on your NIC properties as well (in the form of a checked box).

I had to turn on Network Discovery and File and Printer Sharing in the Windows Firewall settings. To do this I did: Control Panel

Windows Firewall
Bring up the exceptions tab
Make sure Network Discovery and File and Printer Sharing were enabled

Then viola, network thar she blows. Also, I found that when I shared directories on the Windows 2003 SBS and the client had permissions to access the share, it wouldn't showup until I went to the Publish tab in the share's properties on the server and made it published on active directory. After doing that and refreshing my Windows 2003 SBS showed up in the Network.