SBS 2008 Issue

USB Edgeport
1

I am currently having a problem with using the 5 port USB Anywhere device on a VM running Small Business Server 2008.

After installing the 64bit driver, when the system boots it takes substantially longer and ultimately my AD Domain becomes unavailable. After much research I have determined that this driver is causing the NetLogon & Server Service of the server to timeout and fail upon startup which creates a ripple affect to other services that are dependent upon those 2 services.

If I disable the AnywhereUSB drivers in Device Manager the system boots fine.

Any suggestions or is SBS 2008 not supported?

Thank you,

Pete

2

Hi there,

This is the first I’ve heard of this kind of behavior.

Does this issue happen only if the PC is actually connected to the AnywhereUSB, or does it also happen if the PC is disconnected?

By connected, I mean the Status at the bottom-right of the config util saying “Connected to this computer” and the 5 port lights being solid green.

When disconnected, the Status would say “Available for Host Connection” and the 5 port lights would be roaming.

You can connect/disconnect through the config util.

By the way, which AnywhereUSB driver version are you running? To determine this, click “View / Driver Information” and note the version of “awusbsys.sys” (it may be called “awusbsys64.sys”).

3

64bit v2.70

It is the 5 port ANywhere USB device and when I first set it up it had no problems connecting to the device and seeing the USB hard drives attached to it. It wasn’t until the following day when I rebooted the server that we noticed problems with Active Directory becoming unavailable. I did some digging and ended up discovering the Server and Netlogon service part of the issue and went straight to Microsoft who after 5 - 6 hours of troubleshooting couldn’t help me. So I restored from an image a few days prior and everything was fine…until I reinstalled the AnyWhere USB drivers again which caused the exact same result. This time I just disabled the drivers in Device Manager and rebooted…no problems at all. So I am certain that it’s the driver because I can easily recreate and control the issue now. The problem is that I can’t use the device I bought for this project which was going to be used to attach backup media to my virtual machine.

Pete

4

Pete,

Thanks for sharing more details.

Does this issue still happen if there are no USB devices attached to the AnywhereUSB?

5

Yes

6

What exactly is happening with those 2 services, when the AnywhereUSB driver is running? Are they simply failing to start, i.e. the status is “stopped”?

Are there any related errors in Windows Event Viewer?

7

Also, is the SBS 2008 PC in question a domain controller? I guess so but let me know for sure.

8

YES it is a Domain Controller.

When I disable the device in Device Manager my system boots fine…

When I enable the device in Device Manager my system fails to start the Server & Netlogon services and other services then fail due to their dependency. This affects my ability to use certain administration tools to manage user accounts, the main SBS Console, etc. I actually get error messages that say my domain is unavailable.

Is this driver supported for Small Business Server 2008?

9

To answer your question, Server 2008 is supported, but SBS 2008 specifically isn’t listed as being supported, at least in our release notes.

The way I understand it, the only thing different about SBS is that it has some additional components - but the core OS should be the same.

It sounds to me like the issue may be more related to the fact that the host PC is a domain controller rather than the OS being SBS 2008.

I’ll ask our engineering group about this.

10

FYI, I’m told that our QA team did not test the AnywhereUSB with SBS 2008 nor on a PC that’s a domain controller.

So there very well could be issues in that scenario.