SBS, ISA, Exchange, Windows Server – are all products that have experienced some major communications issues if you have installed Windows 2003 Service Pack 2. I’ve blogged about it before with some of the issues that I’ve personally had. The fault lies in the Scalable Networking Pack which are a set of features designed for high performance environments. Some bright spark inside Microsoft decided that it was a GREAT IDEA to enable these features by default when you install W2003 SP2 onto a system. Unfortunately they were WRONG – dead wrong in fact as we later have found many issues with it on SBS servers, The ISA Dev team recommend disabling the features as do the Exchange dev team on their blog.
Finally however someone has seen the light – Microsoft have released a fix which basically disables these features. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948496 is the KB number. Now if you have SBS 2003 R2 servers then by default you will probably find it’s already approved and downloaded it for installation on your servers RIGHT NOW. This means it will need a reboot after the application of this patch. Go do it right now as it will likely fix many of the issues that you might not even realise are linked into this patch.
Microsoft – two thumbs up for finally getting this right!!
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