Tobias Weltner have just released a e-book (downloadable in PDF format) titles Mastering Sharepoint. Find it here http://powershell.com/cs/blogs/ebook/ and now there is really no excuse not to learn PowerShell! Thanks to Jeffrey Snover for the tips! 

The Infrastructure Planning and Design team has released a couple of updated guides for Windows Server 2008 R2 and the new features availiable there. IPD Guides are the foundation for any successfull implementation of Windows Server 2008 R2.  The specific guidens updated for R2 is: Active Directory Domain Services, Internet Information Services 7.5, File Services and Print Services.

The guides are availiable for dowload at http://www.microsoft.com/ipd

When I started looking at EBS I was impressed with one tool, the upgrade wizard, which checked the current infrastructure before the upgrade to EBS. I thought that Microsoft should include this in every Server OS they released – it was just that good! They didn’t do that unfortunaly: they did the second best thing. The EBS team created a stand-alone product, “Microsoft IT Environment Health Scanner”, which builds on the wizard from EBS.

The tool runs some hundreds of checks on your network, and the checks are based on the most common questions that were recieved by Microsoft Support Services. The software is not bound to EBS in any way so it can be used on all Active Directory networks. The main areas where testing is done is Configuration of sites and subnets in Active Directory, Replication of Active Directory, the file system, and SYSVOL shared folders, Name resolution by the Domain Name System (DNS), Configuration of the network adapters of all domain controllers, DNS servers, and e-mail servers running Microsoft Exchange Server , Health of the domain controllers, Configuration of the Network Time Protocol (NTP) for all domain controllers.

And if this tool identifies something – as I always tell my students – fix it! Yellow exclamation points perhaps looks colourful. But they are not good. Every error, even a small one, should be fixed. So get going; check your environment now:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dd7a00df-1a5b-4fb6-a8a6-657a7968bd11&displaylang=en

I have discovered that SBS2008 (sometimes?) have problems with importing a wildcard cert to use as a trusted cert. I have not been able to confirm this since I only have one trusted wildcard cert, but I will try to confirm it and update this post. The cert was  issued to *.mydomain.com as it should be as it is a wildcard cert, and my SBS server was configured to use remote.mydomain.com for RWW. When trying to run the “Add Trusted Certificate” wizard the system would not let me select my trusted cert from the Personal/Certificates store on the SBS Server. However it did present me with the remote.mydomain.com certificate. There was no chaining or permission errors on the certificate and it was exportable and all extenssions were also imported.

What I did was to go into the registry and change HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SmallBusinessServer\Networking\PublicFQDNPrefix to * instead of remote. Then ran the wizard. It now presented me with the option to use the wildcard cert instead. Selected the wildcard and then finished the wizard. Changed the registry value back to remote and everything works fine.