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When you logon to a Windows Small Business Server 2008 or 2011 the SBS Console is started automatically. If you don’t want the SBS Console to start automatic you can prevent this by changing the following Task schedule.

Open Administrative Tools – Task Scheduler, go to Task Scheduler Library – Microsoft – Windows – Windows Small Business Server 2008 or 2011 Standard.

Right click Console task in the right windows and choose disable. Next time you logon the SBS Console will not be started at logon.

When you logon to a Windows Server 2008 (R2) server with a Administrator account, Server Manager is started automatically. If you don’t want the server manager to start automatic you can prevent this by setting the following registry key:

Create a new Dword value “DoNotOpenServerManagerAtLogon” in the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER – Software – Microsoft – Servermanager and set the value to 1

Next time you logon the Server Manager will not be started at logon. You have to set this key for every user you want to prevent automatic startup, because it is a user setting.

The C drive of your Small Business Server 2008 or 2011 is filling rapidly and when you look with a disk analyzer tool like treesize or windirstat you see that the folder C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\W3SVC and a 9 or 10 digit number is several or even dozens of GB. When you open one of the logfiles you see only lines with “POST /ApiRemoting30/WebService.asmx – 8530” in it.

The log file directory belongs to the WSUS Administration IIS website, this is using port 8530. But it is not WSUS that is filling these logfiles rapidly but they are filled if you let the SBS console open. Beside closing the SBS console when not needed, there are 2 option to keep the log files under control.

Option 1:
Open Administrative Tools – Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager, browse through Sites and select the WSUS Administration site and open Logging.

You have 2 options, first you can set the “maximum file size (in bytes):” option under Log file rollover to limit the maximum log file size.
Second option is to completely disable logging, by choosing “Disable” on the Actions menu on the right.

Make sure after you changed anything choose Apply on the upper right and do a iisreset.

Option 2:
The another way for controlling these logfiles is, in SBS 2011 there is by default a scheduled task configured that cleans the logfiles older than 100 days. The same task is added to SBS 2008 by installing Update Rollup 5 (KB2458094) only the default setting with this task is to delete the logfile older than 30 days.

You can change the number of days by opening Administrative Tools, Task Scheduler, go to Microsoft, Windows, Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard, right click the WSUSLogCleaner task and choose properties. Go to the tab Actions and choose Edit…

The value given by Add arguments (optional) is the value for the number of days the logfiles will be kept. So if your logfile directory is stil really big you can decrease the number of days to something more manageable like 30 days or if this is still to much to something like 14 days.

Conclusion:
The grown of the logfiles is caused by not closing the SBS console. My logfiles have shrunken to 20% of the original size with the console open whole day. There are 2 options to control the growth of these logfiles, IIS to disable logging or maximize the logfile size or the task added in sbs 2008 rollup 5 or sbs 2011 to control the maximum number of days logfiles are kept.

Update:
If you would prevent SBS Console from startup automatically read on here

When doing a migration from Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 to SBS 2008, SBS 2011 or Windows server standard version, one of the first things you should do is run the SBS 2003 Best Practices Analyzer and of course check your event log for known problems.

One of the issues I see often is the sysvol, journal wrap Event ID 13568, Source NtFrs in the File Replication Eventlog.

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The File Replication Service has detected that the replica set “DOMAIN SYSTEM VOLUME (SYSVOL SHARE)” is in JRNL_WRAP_ERROR.

If the value name is not present you may add it with the New->DWORD Value function under the Edit Menu item. Type the value name exactly as shown above.———————————————————————————————————————————–

Fixing this issue is in most cases relative simple just add the “Enable Journal Wrap Automatic Restore” registry key noted in the event log and change the value to “1” and restart the “File Replication Service” service.

Before changing the registry key I would recommend to make a backup from the C:\Windows\Sysvol folder.

But after doing that there appeared a new warning message in the File Replication Eventlog, Event ID 13566, Source Ntfrs.

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File Replication Service is scanning the data in the system volume. computer <domain name> cannot become a domain controller until this process is complete. The system volume will then be shared as SYSVOL.

The initialization of the system volume can take some time. The time is dependent on the amount of data in the system volume.———————————————————————————————————————————–

As stated you have to wait a while, but I could wait as long as I want but the sysvol share doesn’t appear.

Solution: At the end the solution seems to be that the ntfrs jet database was corrupted. To solve the problem:

Stop the “File Replication Service” service

Rename the “C:\windows\ntfrs\jet” folder

Start the “File Replication Service” service

One other thing that could happen is the folders under Windows\Sysvol are moved to a subfolder called “NtFrs_PreExisting_See_EventLog”. If you have more than one domain controller this is no problem and the folders will be replicated from another domain controller, but if you only have one domain controller which is mostly the case when using SBS. You can copy the right folders back from the backup you made before, or just move them out of the “NtFrs_PreExisting_See_EventLog” folder to one level up.

Solve these problems before you are starting your migration otherwise you will run into replication errors.