Small Business Servers- who installed yours?

To those techs and business owners who need a quick fix or a hot deal – BEWARE.

When it comes to Small Business Servers the installation needs to be done according to best industry standards. That way as a Computer Technician the installation goes smoother and the business owner gets the best performance.

One of our tech consultants just finished fixing a nightmare of a mess that some other poor tech had tried to configure. The business owner had a daily hassle of up to one hour logging into workstations, and their email wasn’t working properly – and this is for an ecommerce business.

Here were some of the basics that were found and fixed:

Problems discovered:

1- Previous technician had set up a double NAT (network address translation).

2- The DNS was not configured properly by the previous technician– both on the hosting side and internally. Customer said the tech consultant attributed the problems to Qwest.

3- The workstations were set up to interact with the printer independently instead of from a central location.

Issues were resolved:

- remove double NAT (network address translation).

- create an MX record for customer’s email along with a reverse MX record.

- publish a reverse DNS record for customer’s email.

- reconfigure printers to allow them to operate from the servers as a share.

None of these issues could be attributed to QWest.

Lessons learned -

Not all computer consultants are equal.

Review your contracts for major purchases and equipment installations.