Windows Server 2003 SP2 Makes an Appearance

March 15th, 2007 Posted in Windows Server

Without the fanfare usually associated with a major patch, Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 was released on Tuesday along with SP2 for 64 bit XP. We’ve known for well over a year that Service Pack 3 for Windows XP was due this fall, and for at least a couple of months that Vista Service Pack 1 is due around the same time, yet 2003 SP2 was never spoken of. Maybe I missed it due to all the buzz around Vista and Office 2007, as my head has been buried deep in rollout plans for both at work, but I doubt it. Either way, I’ve now got several machines that I’ll be patching at 6am on Sunday … company and caffeine are always welcome if you happen to be in the area instead of being warm in bed where you should be.

So what does this mean for us as Windows server admins? Other than some lost sleep on Sunday, not much. SP2 appears to be primarily a patch rollup. The new features are:

  • Improved logging for clustering
  • Improved performance for SQL Server 2005
  • Improved performance when running as a Virtual Server guest operating system
  • MMC 3.0
  • XMLLite - A fast and small native XML parser.
  • XML logging functionality for dcdiag DNS tests - Allows verbose output of dcdiag DNS tests to be saved in XML format for easy parsing.
  • Improved command line ACL editing tool - Icacls.exe replaces the old Cacls.exe to properly deal with inherited ACLS.
  • Message queueing storage limit changed to 1GB
  • Simplified creation of IPsec policies
  • Support for WPA2 networking
  • Improved group policy for controlling setting for WPA2 and non-broadcast networks
  • Remote Installation Services replaced by Windows Deployment Services - Touch free setup of new computers through network based installations.

For more information on these features, visit Microsoft Technet, or download the standalone executable, iso images, or order a CD and start patching now. The installation is relatively quick (after you’ve taken the time to download the 327 MB package) and doesn’t require any interaction. As is typical with all other Windows patches, it does require a reboot after installation.

According to the release notes, there is one potential complication with the installation. If you are running Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) you must install ADAM service pack 1 before installing Windows Server 2003 service pack 2 otherwise your ADAM instances may stop responding. ADAM SP1 can be downloaded here.

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  1. One Response to “Windows Server 2003 SP2 Makes an Appearance”

  2. By Erich on Apr 11, 2007

    I use Server 2003 R2 for my media storage solution. All my media resides on a RAID5 partition, which is shared so that I can stream the media through XBMC. However, after installing SP2, playback of movies was extremely choppy.

    I’m not sure what changes were made that would have broken this, but uninstalling SP2 fixed the issue.

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