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You May Get an Error "Verify that the Source Server Name is Correct" While Trying to Install SBS into an Existing Domain

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[Today's post comes to us courtesy of Rod White and Damian Leibaschoff from Commercial Technical Support]

When migrating to Small Business Server 2011 standard you may receive the following error message.

Cannot find the Source Server
Verify that the Source Server name is correct, and then try again.

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Cause:

The problem is usually due to a timing issue. The network card is provisioned with DNS servers right before a ping of the source server name is attempted. In some cases, the network card is not yet ready to handle this. When this happens, an exception will happen and the error will be displayed.

Resolution:

The first thing you should do is acknowledge the error by pressing OK and then wait at least 30 seconds before clicking Next to proceed again.  If you receive the same error a second time, then it is most likely NOT the issue described in this article and further troubleshooting would be required to understand why the new server is failing to ping the source server.

To confirm you are experiencing this issue you can check the SBS Setup log by doing the following steps: 

  1. 1. Press <Shift + F10> to open a command prompt.
  2. 2. Run notepad “C:\Program Files\Windows Small Business Server\Logs\SBSSetup.log”
  3. Look for the following exception stack trace:

[..] 
Setup: Pinging old server name.
Setup: InvalidOperationException while pinging: System.Net.NetworkInformation.PingException: An exception occurred during a Ping request. ---> System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: The requested name is valid, but no data of the requested type was found
  at System.Net.Dns.InternalGetHostByName(String hostName, Boolean includeIPv6)
  at System.Net.Dns.GetHostAddresses(String hostNameOrAddress)
  at System.Net.NetworkInformation.Ping.Send(String hostNameOrAddress, Int32 timeout, Byte[] buffer, PingOptions options)
  --- End of inner exception stack trace ---
  at System.Net.NetworkInformation.Ping.Send(String hostNameOrAddress, Int32 timeout, Byte[] buffer, PingOptions options)
  at System.Net.NetworkInformation.Ping.Send(String hostNameOrAddress)
  at Microsoft.WindowsServerSolutions.Setup.SBSSetup.MigrationInformationPagePresenter.ValidateServerName(Boolean runCostlyValidation)

If you are not seeing this exception and still getting the same error, verify that you can resolve the name of the source server properly:

  1. Select <Shift + F10> to open a command prompt.
  2. Ping the Source Server Netbios name (i.e. SBS2003).
  3. Ping the Source Server internal FQDN (i.e. SBS2003.R2.local).

Note: Make sure you have not misspelled the name of the source server or internal domain.

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