I am in the middle of converting a client from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 – this server hasn’t been particularly well maintained over its lifetime, and as such requires a fair few prerequisite updates before we can get down to the fun bits of the migration.

I needed to install Small Business Server 2003 Service Pack 1 – however it wouldn’t let me! The log files led me to something I believe would be a rarely-seen edge-case. First, the symptoms.

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Integration\Windows Small Business Server 2003\Logs\

setup.log:

Component Name: Server Tools
Version:        5.0
Installation Status:    Failure
Error Message:        An error occurred while copying files for the Server Tools component.  See C:\Program Files\Microsoft Integration\Windows Small Business Server 2003\Logs\SBSMSI-remote.LOG for the list of files that were not copied. You may want to run Setup again and reinstall the component.
An error occurred while copying files for the Server Tools component.  See C:\Program Files\Microsoft Integration\Windows Small Business Server 2003\Logs\SBSMSI-Backup.LOG for the list of files that were not copied. You may want to run Setup again and reinstall the component.

SBSMSI-remote.log:

MSI (s) (84:34) [23:17:03:647]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying IISDIR property. Its current value is ‘\\SERVER’. Its new value: ‘\\SERVER\’.

[snip]

MSI (s) (84:34) [23:17:03:663]: Product: Windows Small Business Server Remote Portal — Error 1316. A network error occurred while attempting to read from the file: \\SERVER\wwwroot\Images\help.gif

Interesting – The installer is setting IISDIR to the server name, and then trying to read files from non-existent shares. IISDIR is generally c:\inetpub\wwwroot. This led to a search through the registry to no success.

The Application event log was also showing the following errors:

Source: MsiInstaller
Event ID: 11316
Description:
Product: Windows Small Business Server Remote Portal — Error 1316. A network error occurred while attempting to read from the file: \\SERVER\wwwroot\Images\help.gif

and

Source: MsiInstaller
Event ID: 11325
Description:
Product: Windows Small Business Server Common — Error 1325. ‘ConnectComputer’ is not a valid short file name.

On a guess, I decided to check the Home Directory of the default website in IIS Manager – it was pointing at a non-existent network location. The server used to have a line-of-business application running on it which took over the default website for dashboard reporting.

Resolution Steps

1. Launch IIS Manager (Start -> Administrative Tools -> Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager)
2. Expand the tree to the default website (Internet Information Services -> Servername -> Web Sites)
3. Right-click ‘Default Web Site’, select ‘Properties’
4. Go to the ‘Home Directory’ tab
5. Select ‘A directory located on this computer’
6. Set the Local Path to ‘C:\Inetpub\wwwroot’
7. Click OK, and restart IIS
8. Run the SBS 2003 SP1 Installation again

On an SBS 2003 server today I had an issue where the root cause was the Windows Time (w32time) service not starting.

The ‘Configure E-mail and Internet Connection Wizard’ would not complete, erroring at the ‘Network Configuration’ stage. Logs showed the following:
Error 0x80070422 returned from call to Configuring the time service().
Error 0x80070422 returned from call to CNetCommit::Common().
Error 0x80070422 returned from call to CNetCommit::Commit().

Services MMC snapin showed the Windows Time service as stopped. Starting the service gave the following error:
“Could not start the Windows Time service on Local Computer.
Error 1058: The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it. “

Solution:

• Click ‘Start -> Run’
• type ‘regsvr32 w32time.dll’, click ok
• when it says ‘DllRegisterServer in w32time.dll succeeded’, click ‘ok’
• Start the time service.

The error will now be resolved and the internet connection wizard should go through without error.