OT: MS Small Office Server

[GCC Consulting]

Just spent the better part of the day installing Small Business Server 2003
(from my action pak) on an older Compaq server and a new HP ML 100.

This is a 5 cd install set. However, MS in their inimitable way of making a
simple think difficult, makes the install a bit confusing.  Boot from disk one
to start the install, continue to disk 2 and then 3, each time being prompted
for the disk by number.  After disk 2 your are prompted for program install
options.  I took , among others to have IE6 and Outlook 2003 installed for
distribution.  

After disk 3 finished I was prompted to but in my Outlook 2003 disk.  I looked
all through my Action Pak disks.  My associate whose office I was at, looked
through all of his.  We couldn't find any disk labeled Outlook 2003.  So, I
tried my Office 2003 Pro disk.  No luck.  

Finally I called their help line and was informed that disk 4 was the one with
Outlook 2003.  !/2 hour wasted.

No the HP was another story.  This was a brand new machine. The install went
well until it showed that certain functions were not installed including the
NIC.  We installed the Intel drivers and made a NIC driver disk and installed
the driver.  The system then found the NIC.  However, when the system completed
the install and rebooted, No network connection.

A call to HP tech support let us to download a "revised" driver. Created the
floppy and found it had the same version # as the old driver but a different
date.  This one worked.

The other problem was with the network configuration wizard.  It found the DHCP
server and its IP address.  I was presented with a screen with an IP address
assigned, the subnet and the gateway address.  I entered the primary and
secondary DNS addresses and finished the configuration. When I tried to access
the internet to update , No luck.

Opened the tcp/ip properties and found that the fixed IP address I entered was
moved to the DNS address (my entered address had been removed) and the gateway
address had changed.  Now, there is a wireless router which has the address that
the gateway address was change to.  After manually correcting this mess,
everything finally worked.  The whole job took just under 6 hours.

So much for ease of installation.

Richard Kreiss
GCC Consulting