Generally depressing thoughts

[interele]

Could you restore your network ( and how long would it take ) if

your whole site was completely destroyed ??

 

M

[Sylv3r]

I could restore it - but I wouldn't be able to put a time on how long it would take to put back in place. I would imagine whatever figure I wanted it to be I would need to add a few more days.

[Gatt]

Have wondered whether I could replicate my DC to a Virtual PC on my home PC via VPn...

[srochford]

Your school ought to have a disaster recovery plan in place with details of who would do what in the event of disaster. This will cover not just IT but everything that might need to be done.

 

it might be that if fire destroyed the whole school you'd simply abandon it and start again but it would certainly be useful to have data backed up somewhere off site.

 

You can see our code of practice here and there's a useful document here on how to start planning what you do in the event of disaster.

 

You almost certainly can't think of everything that could go wrong but you can think of general stuff and then look at individual services and how you would restore them and then think about which are the most important (and this needs to be done in negotiation with others), which depend on other things and so on.

 

ITIL has some good stuff to say about this - eg a quick google found this which also might give you some ideas.

[FN-GM]

We could restore it all, but it would take time.

 

Restoring all the services alone will take a while plus you will have to setup clients and the network hardware again.

[Michael]

Could you restore your network ( and how long would it take ) if

your whole site was completely destroyed ??

 

It's incredibly difficult to quantify a whole site. Presumably by using the term 'network' you mean absolutely everything? Servers, workstations, printers, switches?

 

I suppose if you had no backups/images whatsoever then you could be looking at weeks 'potentially'. If you're just talking servers, then I would say a few hours (AD, DHCP, DNS and any other services), then data on top. It really depends how much there is to restore. As for workstations, it depends on the size of the image you're deploying I suppose. Obviously machines with 5GB images will be done much quicker than if I was deploying 20GB images.

 

Printers are generally pretty quick to setup/deploy and as for replacing switches, it can take forever to re-patch everything. High density switches can make this procedure easier.

[FN-GM]

It's incredibly difficult to quantify a whole site. Presumably by using the term 'network' you mean absolutely everything? Servers, workstations, printers, switches?

 

I suppose if you had no backups/images whatsoever then you could be looking at weeks 'potentially'. If you're just talking servers, then I would say a few hours (AD, DHCP, DNS and any other services), then data on top. It really depends how much there is to restore. As for workstations, it depends on the size of the image you're deploying I suppose. Obviously machines with 5GB images will be done much quicker than if I was deploying 20GB images.

 

Printers are generally pretty quick to setup/deploy and as for replacing switches, it can take forever to re-patch everything. High density switches can make this procedure easier.

 

Also if thw whole site went you will probably wont get the same workstations so you will have to rebuild images another bit of time gone. Also something else to consider would be re installing networking cable throughout the whole site. That can take weeks.

[Gatt]

Pity We dont have a central server where we could all have VMs with a DR image of critical servers

 

/me wakes up from dreamland again...

[webman]

Also if thw whole site went you will probably wont get the same workstations so you will have to rebuild images another bit of time gone.

 

This isn't a problem if you use CC3. Providing you have workstation drivers, just stick a USB drive in and away it builds.

[Michael]

Also if thw whole site went you will probably wont get the same workstations so you will have to rebuild images another bit of time gone. Also something else to consider would be re installing networking cable throughout the whole site. That can take weeks.

 

Indeed very true. Installing a new cable infrastructure would take weeks I agree. Likewise new images too. Does this mean you'd have to source replacement installation discs too and license information

[FN-GM]

This isn't a problem if you use CC3. Providing you have workstation drivers, just stick a USB drive in and away it builds.

 

Actually you can do it on Windows Vinilla as well. I did it at my old school

 

Vista Sysprep is also very good for moving between hardware.

Edited March 13, 2009 by FN-GM

[witch]

Could you restore your network if

your whole site was completely destroyed ??

 

M

 

 

No!

[srochford]

Pity We dont have a central server where we could all have VMs with a DR image of critical servers

 

/me wakes up from dreamland again...

 

There are plenty of them around - you just have to pay for them :-)

 

Janet has a co-location facility available which is pretty cheap but I'm not sure if it's available to schools. There are plenty of companies in docklands that will house stuff for you but I've no idea how expensive it would be.

 

the simplest and cheapest thing would be to negotiate with a neighbouring school so that you have some space available there in which you keep your VMs etc

[laserblazer]

This practically happened at our sister Middle School. Contractors managed to release asbestos everywhere and everything was ripped out and replaced. The network cabling may have survived. It was a big insurance job and they just started from scratch. All new gear, and a specialist team to install it.

 

If it happened elswhere, then it would almost certainly be an insurance job.

 

I guess I could rebuild it myself having just installed two computer suites and a new server on my own but it would take forever.

[imiddleton25]

when i did our DR plan , worked it all out based on loosing everything , servers, switches workstations and there laid the biggest problem as a supplier to find you 10 servers and 200 workstations , I asked Dell this question their answer 7 days till you get them on site.

 

So you can do your bit as quick as you like but without any kit you are stuffed. I based our DR plan on business critical stuff first so set up an office in our sports hall with 10 laptops for most important admin workers , we keep a whole weeks worth of data off site , I put in the plan 10 days as a realistic time frame. Even getting a new ADSL line if you have had a fire say can take days or weeks if the cabling is damaged.

 

 

Lets hope we never need to do it ( my first draft DR plan was to keep a one way ticket to the Caribbean in a fire proof safe) Bursar didn't like that plan, The thought of having to rebuild 9 years worth of infrastructure and hardware is something I would rather not have to do.

[srochford]

So you can do your bit as quick as you like but without any kit you are stuffed. I based our DR plan on business critical stuff first so set up an office in our sports hall with 10 laptops for most important admin workers , we keep a whole weeks worth of data off site , I put in the plan 10 days as a realistic time frame. Even getting a new ADSL line if you have had a fire say can take days or weeks if the cabling is damaged.

 

I think this is sensible - you work out what's "business critical" and you get that up and running critically.

 

Realistically, it's very rare that *everything* get's destroyed. What's more likely is much smaller scale disaster - one server bursts into flames, for example. In this case it's possible to have a recovery plan which will get you going much more quickly. If you have your servers as VMs then you can pretty quickly stick them on new hardware (assuming you have more than one box that can host them). If you don't have such a box you could probably get something that would to at your local PC World etc (you quite possibly have a desktop you could purloin for a few days if it's really critical)

[p858snake]

Also if thw whole site went you will probably wont get the same workstations so you will have to rebuild images another bit of time gone. Also something else to consider would be re installing networking cable throughout the whole site. That can take weeks.

 

It's incredibly difficult to quantify a whole site. Presumably by using the term 'network' you mean absolutely everything? Servers, workstations, printers, switches?

 

I suppose if you had no backups/images whatsoever then you could be looking at weeks 'potentially'. If you're just talking servers, then I would say a few hours (AD, DHCP, DNS and any other services), then data on top. It really depends how much there is to restore. As for workstations, it depends on the size of the image you're deploying I suppose. Obviously machines with 5GB images will be done much quicker than if I was deploying 20GB images.

 

Printers are generally pretty quick to setup/deploy and as for replacing switches, it can take forever to re-patch everything. High density switches can make this procedure easier.

 

We could restore it all, but it would take time.

 

Restoring all the services alone will take a while plus you will have to setup clients and the network hardware again.

 

If your whole site was destroyed (by fire/bomb ect) would you really be worried about getting your whole site back up and running?

Personally I would be more worried about getting a server and remote backups of student data running in a temporary building that's acting as the admin dept, even if that meant networking cables running across the flooring so they have basic services.

[sidewinder]

If the whole, entire site was destroyed (which is so, so unlikely due to its size and sprawl) then no. Well I could rebuild a new domain, but all the backups are onsite in a firesafe which probably wouldnt survive something so big it destroyed the whole school. But then could people? Think the network would be the least of the worries if something that big happened.

 

If the server room was burnt down, I could rebuild the domain with new servers and transfer across data again within a week probably, for basic services anyway. But it would take time to run new fibre to the rest of the school etc as that would all be ruined, as well as our WAN link so there wouldnt be any external access.

I havent got any backups of server beyond system states, because I just dont know how to do it everyone says they've got VM images of their critical servers but I just dont have a clue how to do that, with free tools at least

[jamesb]

In the school I worked in, so long as any one building was left standing then I could rebuild the entire network. In fact I wouldn't need to (other than obviously putting in new workstations and so on) since the network was capable of running from any one building without a particular problem. This was due to our, sometimes unreliable, fibre web which linked each building to at least two others. At any moment links might fall over for a few minutes, then pick back up so each building had to be capable of acting independently for a reasonable length of time.

 

In the situation described, with one building left (out of six) I'd need to shuffle some FSMO roles, but data was mirrored to each building, each held a DC, and each could function independently for some time.

 

Of course, if the entire site was destroyed then no, there wouldn't be much I could do as all the backup procedures in place would have been destroyed with it. I'm picturing this as a meteor shower, sounds more fun that way.

[elsiegee40]

If our whole site went, so would most of this part of town, including my house. I think I would have other worries!

 

Flippancy aside: It would take some time, but it would be recoverable.