I'm an MCSE from several years ago that has had a SBS2k3 set up and running for a couple of years.  We basically had no major problems until recently when our email was being hijacked by someone using the SMTP virtual server. This caused literally 100's of emails that were sent through our server and rejected back to the admin account. This was the first clue that we had a problem.  I looked in the exchange message queue and saw hundreds more that were about to be rejected. I did some reading to try and see what settings were wrong and thought I had it set up correctly. It was obvious I did not when the messages kept coming.  Another problem I ran into was using SUS to update all clients on the network. I installed SUS but couldn't the the GPO to force the client machines to look to the server for updates.  (there was a patch I needed to install that I didn't know about). Lastly, I never could get SQL installed to allow full text searches on the sharepoint site. I went through the instructions and thought I was following the steps just as they were written, but it just would never work right.

Three days ago I decided to call in some pros to look at the machine. I had spent all the time I had trying to figure it out, but had to run the business too and couldn't take a chance on making the problems worse. I gave Mariette Knap an explanation of my problems and paid for the first hour for them to take a look. She ended up needing an additional 2hrs for 3 hrs total when she went through all of the logs and started correcting all of the errors she found in there. There were several patches that were not installed that were causing problems and things that were not configured quite right.

Everything I expected was accomplished and it took 3 hrs only. I have confidence that it was done correctly and the repairs are not going to generate more unexpected problems.  I would highly recommend the service to anyone in a similar situation where you are usually considered the expert, but are caught not knowing exactly what to do next.

Thank you for the help I received through this remote support service.

Regards,
Phillip Ford