Removing the Small Business Server Domain Controller Requirement

Have you ever wanted to use your license of Microsoft Small Business Server, just to use the base Windows Server 2003 portion? I know, I know, there are so many advantages to having a domain and using exchange, etc... etc... etc....

For my purposes, I wasn't interested!

So, going through the SBS install, I decided to skip the follow-on steps after installing Windows Server 2003. All was well for exactly 1 week, when for some reason, the server began shutting down, hourly. Not cool.

After taking a peek at the Event Viewer, I found this:

"This computer must be configured as a domain controller. It will be shut down in 60 minutes. To prevent this computer from shutting down, run Setup on the disk that you used to install the operating system to configure the computer as a domain controller."

See: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555087

Next, I did what I always do, I Googled for a way around this... Luckily I came across a great post here: http://forums.speedguide.net/showthread.php?t=173731

The post is about 3/4 of the way down the page by Blarghie.

Worked like a charm and I am very thankful! It saved me a huge headache. Here's the basics of what he said:

The first thing I did was to install the server normally, the first chance you get to cancel the install of SBS bloat is when Windows starts for the first time after install, I seized my opportunity.

What I didn't see however was the quite frankly ridiculous scenario whereby Microsoft had decided to force restart the server every hour and NET SEND spam the network "this server doesn't comply with licensing requirements" across the entire network. Microsoft can stick that.

Anyway, like I said it was Pafts post that brought me here to the forum, and I've found a slightly more elegant solution to this problem rather than just aggressively killing the process until Windows gives up trying to start it again, and I'd like to share it in the hope that Google will re-index and pick it up for others to use. You may have noticed this service cannot be disabled via the MMC snap-in.

My search term on google was: how to stop the SBCore service

Anyway, down to business…
- Tools you'll need – Process Explorer from www.sysInternals.com

As you probably know, you have a service called SBCore or "SBS Core Services", which executes the following process: C:\WINDOWS\system32\sbscrexe.exe

If you kill it, it just restarts – and if you try and stop it you are told Access Denied.

If you fire up Process Explorer, you can select the process and Suspend it, now we can start to disable the thing.

Run RegEdit32.exe and expand the nodes until you reach the following hive / key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SBCore

Right click this, hit permissions and give the "Administrators" group on the local machine full access ( don't forget to replace permissions on child nodes ). F5 in regedit and you'll see all of the values and data under this key.

Select the "Start" DWORD and change it from 2 to 4 – this basically sets the service to the "Disabled" state as far as the MMC services snap-in (and windows for that matter) is concerned.

Next, adjust the permissions on the file C:\WINDOWS\system32\sbscrexe.exe so that EVERYONE account is denied any sort of access to this file.

Then go back to process explorer, and kill the sbscrexe.exe process, if it doesn't restart – congratulations!

Load up the services MMC snap-in and you should find that "SBS Core Services" is stopped and marked as Disabled.

Hope this helps you out like it did me!