Windows product stickers as an insight into the past | Hacker News Reader

Windows product stickers as an insight into the past

smackeyacky.blogspot.com

57 pointssmackeyacky13 comments

Even as someone who formerly worked at Microsoft, it was never easy to really understand the full Microsoft enterprise product suite without spending years of my life becoming an IT expert. I always thought this Small Business Suite product was ingenious... it included everything and integrated them in a simple way that you could get them all going. And the pricing was relatively inexpensive, just enough to hook you and jack you on pricing if by chance you ended up growing.

Yeah, if I remember it was amazingly cheap if you were below 25 users but that 26th would force you to upgrade everything to the big boy versions.

original author here.

It's funny you can get completely silo'd in your career, thinking you've seen it all. SBS 2008 is a really surprising little offering, lots of the admin tools seem streets ahead of anything I'd seen out of Microsoft on the enterprise editions, even if only that they point out problems and have actual links that work to send you in the right direction to solve them.

In some ways it reminds me a lot of the problems I used to have with some small customers when I first started my career and was dealing with small business owners who didn't want to learn how to be system administrators.

It might not be cool, but it's still fascinating.

edit: It is also surprisingly snappy on some fairly average hardware and running in a VM. Not sure what Microsoft have done between 2008 and 2019 but none of it was adding to the performance.

I remember using SBS 2003 I think it was, turning five different servers into one box, including migrating a database to SQL server from some older version for an Epicor backend. Worked great and did everything we needed; totally worth the price.

That and Windows NAS were some interesting versions and ways to get around CAL pricing.

Must have done like 20 or 30 of these when they came out. Also did a lot of migrations from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 and later to SBS 2011.

It was a nightmare with everything on one Box as its had this automated type migration that migrated from say SBS 2003 to SBS 2008. So you had to migrate Exchange, Domain Controller, Sharepoint etc. all in one go. Then it keeps getting stuck and you had to restart the migration.

The technicians that worked on the SBS servers were always from the lowest cost IT Support companies that these smalls business could afford. So after a few years these server would have so many hacks and miss configuration on them it would take hours (on a Friday evening) to get Exchange and the DC in a state that would allow the migration to go through.

Nice to hear from somebody who had to use the product. Like a lot of retro stuff you don't really get a feel for what it was like to live with when you are just playing around with the installer.

In my experience running Windows on QEMU/KVM (using libvirt and virt-manager), I've been unable to get Windows VMs to output smooth audio without stuttering, nor 60fps screen redrawing (https://www.testufo.com/ fails miserably, even cmd and mintty feel sluggish). Is there a good solution for this?

WMWare Workstation (or Fusion on the Mac).

When I played with VFIO for gaming, I did use pulseaudio passthrough for audio, never had any particular issues.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF#Pa...

Will look into that, thanks!

> DNS and DHCP (although why you wouldn't just let your router do that even back in 2008 escapes me)

Doesn't Active Directory depend on being able to write to DNS?

That might be the reason it was set up that way, I've never been an AD administrator so I'm not sure. For a small business, it probably was much easier to have the DHCP and DNS stuff under one system rather than also having to learn how the router works.

AD DNS features security ACLs where you give permissions on records who can write what. Computer accounts make their own DNS records and enables updating them securely to whatever address you got assigned (office 1, office 2, VPN..).

AD is certainly dependant on DNS and being able to write it. Adding domain controllers adds some srv and A records so that it is discoverable by services like LDAP, Kerberos. Moreover, Kerberos won't work without a proper DNS name as SPNs must match, even if you RDP into a client workstation. Connecting by IP fallbacks to NTLM.

AD, according to wiki, was previewed in 1999. I don't know if there are standards that would enable secure DNS update at that time or not and the prevelance of routers that supported DNS client registrations.

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