I officially feel the need to rant now that I'm on Day 4 of trying to restore my home server from backups, and it got me thinking about what I like and what I hate about Small Business Server 2003...
Like:
- When it works, it works well with minimal intervention.
- It has all the functionality I need in a home server and a little bit more, and runs it all on one machine.
- Makes it easy to manage accounts and permissions in a small domain.
- Roaming profiles/my documents/other nifty WS2k3 features are relatively easy to turn on and use and are particularly nifty for a home network.
- Terminal server to it, make any changes, done. Most of the time I don't need to log onto the physical machine.
Hate:
- It is finicky as hell. If you install it, do not even think about installing updates to the OS until you've fully finished the install, apparently some later update craps out the domain install so if you do them out of order your install will be botched.
- Want to change the domain name? Reinstall from scratch.
- Make a mistake with the IIS setup that talks to Exchange or the like? Reinstall from scratch.
- It has a nice little wizard that lets you make a full backup (using ntbackup) of your system. As far as I can tell it is completely impossible to successfully rebuild from this backup. You can get individual files back, but following the multi-page incredibly confusing and out of order instructions from hell you still cannot do it. I think they're wrong, and I'm about to start attempt #7 for getting my server back. Keep in mind, this is the server for which I have a complete *.bkf file. One that ntbackup recognizes. My current theory is that you need to do a full SBS reinstall creating a brand new domain and everything, and then overwrite that with the backup. Make sure you don't install any updates from Microsoft Update that came after your backup creation date! That might confuse it! Apparently they got far enough to think "we should make it easy to back this system up" but not as far as "and hell why don't we make it so that you can just point a program at that backup and have it rebuild your damn system".
I got so frustrated on attempt #4 or so that I seriously considered wiping the machine, installing my copy of OpenBSD 3.9 on it, and spending my effort figuring out how to get Windows machines to talk to that in a reasonable way. At least there I know how to back it up and that if I do so I can rebuild without hassle.
The sad part of this to me is that I've been very happy with SBS and recommending it to friends, but now not only can I not recommend it (who really wants a server they can't get back up and running as quickly as possible? It is the server, by definition it is incredibly important) but I'm going to be giving serious consideration to alternatives.
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