IT questions

Jonny_B

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Oct 14, 2004
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How much of a pain in the ass is it to switch an office with about 14 workstations and two servers from simple networking to domain use?

how about setting up exchange? is it hard? this is coming from someone with no experience other than general geekery.

If someone can point out tutorials that'd be really cool too.
 
Get microsoft exchange for dummies if you want to go that route. I swear by any dummies book. :D

I'm not sure about the switching of everything out though.
 
There can be hitches, especially if there are a lot of files/settings currently on the computer to migrate over to the domain. Exchange is pretty easy to set up. Which version of 2003 are you going with? Standard, SBS, etc
Microsoft has a couple of papers on their site that explain pretty decently how to migrate from a workgroup to a domain.

edit: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sbs/2003/deploy/sbs_p2p.mspx
deals with sbs but it is essentially the same process in server
 
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not hard at all.. Very easy. Once you have the main active directory server up and running (about a day or less), it'll take nothing to setup the other server as a backup controller. Then you just add all the users to the active directory and set your share permissions. adding users to the exchange server can come directly from the ads.

I know I'm simplifying it a bit, but it really isn't that hard as much as it is time consuming.

I'd say three days with one person doing it.
 
damn! looks like it would be perfect but it'll only run on dual processor machines. much like win2k server before it, it doesn't support more than two, even though it will handle dual dual-core processors. don't ask me what's up with that.

still... it's such a sweet looking solution maybe we should invest in a newer dual processor machine.
 
SBS 2003 will run on single core or single cpu servers. Depends on how much traffic you plan on pushing through the box, whether you'd want to have a single cpu in the box.
 
That's true. If we get something new single cpu would be fine. We don't have a lot of traffic, especially considering that our file servers would remain file servers and the new one would only handle the domain and exchange stuff.

Any idea if it'd run on two 600MHz Xeons? It's currently a quad but we could try pulling two out and see if that works. It's more likely to happen if we don't have to buy new hardware. The budget is constantly tight. I'm still using a 1.7GHz P4 as a cadbox.
 
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We have our ADS and backup ADS both running a Dual Xeon 1Ghz with 2gb of ram. We have about 35 machines and it runs just fine. Having load balancing setup between the two servers and gigabit ethernet (don't forget the Cat5e or Cat6) will make a huge difference on your performance.