Category Archives: Windows Server 2008

Updating Sharepoint WSS 3 to Foundation

Sorry for the lag in posts around here, it’s been an incredibly busy July for me. I had a son in mid-June and am moving at the end of July, so everything in between has been dominating my schedule. Hopefully I’ll get back to in full very soon!

Anyway, over the last couple of weeks I’ve been attempting to update our Sharepoint WSS 3.0 server at work to Foundation Server 2010. When I started out, I didn’t think it would be that big of a deal. Both of them are made by Microsoft, this upgrade has to happen all the time, right? Well… not exactly. Not from what I found out anyway.

Windows Server Time

The last few weeks at work I’ve been struggling to keep our server clocks synchronized. We have around 10 servers in our domain, a few of them physical but most of them virtual. The problem is that our primary domain controller is a Server 2003 box that we’ve been relying on for far too long. Every morning when I arrive all the client PC clocks across our network are several minutes slow, in comparison to the actual time as well as to our PDC’s clock. After reading up on how this should work over at the Windows Server Time blog, I’m still baffled.

According to the design, all the secondary domain controllers should be pulling their time from my PDC, so whether the PDC’s clock is set by its own internal clock or from an external source is irrelevant. That’s not happening though. When I check the 3 domain controllers, the two secondary DCs (running Server 2003r2 and 2008r2, by the way) are exactly the same, and they’ve strayed away from the PDC’s time by several minutes. Every morning. And not by the same amount. Sometimes it’s 1 minute, sometimes it’s 5 minutes, sometimes 10 minutes. It makes absolutely no sense to me!

My plan of attack is to move our PDC emulator role to the 2008 DC, then set that server to rely on an external time source to stay accurate. The only thing I can think is that there’s something weird about having a 2008r2 server relying on a 2003 box for its time, but I can’t find any evidence to back that theory up. There could also be something going on with the virtual host –> virtual server hierarchy, but I also have not found evidence about that. If anyone has any ideas for me, please feel free to shout out!

Current Projects

At the company where I work we have a few projects that are high on our list.  Over the next few months I’ll try to post some short tips, tricks, and guides regarding some of those implementations.

The first (ongoing) project is Microsoft’s Windows Sharepoint Server, or WSS 3.0.  This is the free version of Sharepoint, and while there are a few limitations, for us this has been an awesome platform.