Installing SBS 2003 SP1, or how I spent my weekend!
So I though I would share with you that not every upgrade is a smooth process. How to work through it when it gets ugly, and even with a upgrade as well tested as SBS2003 SP1 things can come from no where and ruin your best laid plans.
I got into town late in the afternoon Friday to prepare for the upgrade on Saturday morning. This client has people who work all hours so we had warned everyone the network would be unavailable on and off the better part of the weekend. As you read the following horror story keep in mind when I left Sunday night I knew the client was going to be back in business Monday morning, although I will admit, Sunday afternoon I was going over the steps in my head to restore my tested backup to a vpc and use my buddy Jeff's Swing Migration (http://www.sbsmigration.com/) to get onto another server. I knew there would be 30 engineers needing access to the network resources Monday morning; and the server is down was not an option.
Remove old notes and patch logs.
Clear desktop, clear temps ect.
Make sure backups are set to run.
12:45 repair dcom error, boy I hate these!
Hook up Nexstar USB case server blue screens, a clue?
Configure backup to run to only non-Nexstar external drive onsite.
Check in with WSUS console, see 30 clients reporting so far, smile for the first time today.
Send note to pss and upload the memory dump they requested.
3:30am wake suffering from heat exhaustion, loose entire day Monday will spare you the gory details.
Test Nexstar case on my sever, same blue screen.
Talk to pss deliver my test results NST-350U2 will blue screen NST250U2 will not, they are looking into it. They both worked fine before sp1. Talked to High-Rely (www.High-Rely.com)about SP1 compatibility, saw their 7 drive bay unit at SMBTN and it looked real good. Need something for this client to replace the Nexstar drive enclosures.
Also send dump from my server during test.