First is the transfer of e-mail. As those of you who have read my ramblings over the years know, transferring Exchange mailboxes can be a real pain, especially if moving from one system to another. In the past what I have had to do is log on as each user, open Outlook, create a Personal Folder file (.pst), and copy all the mailbox data over from the Exchange mailbox, folder by folder. That was a real pain for the four or five mailboxes we have here in the office. Then of course I had to copy it all back once the new Exchange server was up and running. My client has 15 to 20 users, with a few extra ones thrown in! Individually copying .pst files was not an option.

Fortunately Microsoft thought of this too. They have included a nice utility called ExMerge on the SBS 2000 CD. There are actually two versions; Version 3.70 for use with Exchange 5.5 which is part of SBS 4.5, and Version 6.0 for the Exchange 2000 that comes with SBS 2000. There are also two methods for transferring mailboxes, the One Step, and the Two Step. I assume the One Step is for moving mailboxes between similar, existing Exchange servers. Since I needed to move mailboxes between two different versions of Exchange, one of which hadn't been installed yet, I used the Two Step method.

The new server, raw with only the Windows 2000 Server operating system software installed is connected to the network as an independent server. Create a share on the new server and map a drive it to on the old server. Then copy the ExMerge software onto the old server and run it. ExMerge will ask you for the source server name and will then list all the mailboxes and let you pick those you want to copy. Then if you're doing the Two Step method it asks for the destination. This should be the share you created on the new server. The program will then create .pst files on the destination share for each mailbox with the same name as the mailbox. ExMerge took about two hours to copy 20 some odd mailboxes over a 10 mbps network.

Later, once I had completed the Small Business Server installation on the new server, and recreated the users and their new mailboxes with the same names on the new Exchange 2000 server, it was time for Step Two. As you have guessed, Step Two copies data from the .pst files into the new mailboxes with the same name. This process only took about 30 minutes because it was being driven by the much faster new server and didn't have to go across a slow network. Boy! That was a heck of a lot easier than the old manual way.

WINS To The Rescue
This same client has several notebook PCs that connect to the network wirelessly. These clients suddenly were unable to log on to the network domain. Because these clients were wireless, they had been configured with static IP addresses thus bypassing the DHCP service on the server which automatically configures workstations using dynamic IP addresses. 

Windows 2000 depends on DNS to resolve computer names on the network. Prior to Win 2K, Microsoft networks relied on NetBIOS to name and locate computers on the net. There are several ways that computers resolve names with NetBIOS; broadcast, lookup in a file called LMHosts, or via a service called WINS, Windows Internet Naming Service. WINS maintains a dynamic database of computer NetBIOS names and their corresponding IP addresses. It also maintains the names of the network domain and the addresses of the domain controllers. This facilitates workstations being able to log on to the domain. One of the items that using DHCP typically configures on a client workstation is the address of the WINS servers. Since my wireless notebooks didn't have benefit of DHCP, I suspected they weren't configured with the WINS server address. Sure enough, I added the WINS addresses and the notebooks were able to logon without a problem.

Another workstation developed a somewhat related problem. When the user attempted to open a document on the server with Word and looked for it by searching Network Neighborhood, she would see no computers besides her own. However she could perform a Search for Computers and find the server and then access her documents. Naturally I checker her WINS configuration first using winipcfg. She was using DHCP so the WINS was configured properly. I decided to check the other end, the server. Here I found a couple of anomalies and corrected them. I then restarted the WINS service and she was able to browse the Network Neighborhood and find her documents.

With Windows 2000 we are supposed to be able to get away from using WINS and NetBIOS names. However, when we mix earlier versions of Windows, such as Windows 98, it’s a good idea to have a properly configured WINS server running on your network.