sidewinder

Its gone cloudy here, so probably not a lot!

So I'm right in thinking it would be a nightmare then! In a good majority of our cabs we would need switches on more than 1 VLAN

Hi Phil, we're aiming to get it deployed over the summer but the earlier the better really!

The one thing I dont quite get about VLAN's is how do you make sure each machine is connected to the correct VLAN? Do you have certain ports on each switch or is there some way of automatically assigning it? Because we have 30+ switches with different numbers of staff/student machines in each area and doing it manually would be an absolute nightmare

Well our main file server runs on SATA disks and is fine...but there will be the additional load of VM's...which of course will benefit from quicker disks

The 2012 confusion is caused by whats being specified on the quotes. I can only go on what has been quoted, I have presented the same requirements to every company. Hence why I wanted a second opinion I do definately need a SAN, no need for NAS. Hadn't actually realised the netapp did both. Would you recommend a particular company to quote for an S7000?

Ah thats good to know, wasnt sure of the differences between the 2 apart from the 2312 being better...pretty much discounts the 2012 option then! Yeah iSCSI, dont think we can stretch to fibre channel unfortunately andy: i agree we should go for the fastest disks we can afford...but to get the capacity we want they'll have to be SATA really. The one quote with SAS is the most expensive (unsurprisingly) and offers about 7tb...meaning we'd probably have filled them up in a year

Been getting a few quotes for a SAN, I've got an idea of which I'm more interested in than others, but I just wondered what people would recommend out of these. Or is there something better I should be looking at for our price point (upto £15k) HP MSA2312i, 16x450GB SAS disks HP MSA2012, 7x2Tb SATA disks (this is approx half the cost of the 2312i) NetApp FAS2020A, 12x1Tb SATA NexSAN Boy, 14x500GB SATA I havent put prices down because they all come under our budget, its not too much of an issue. I know that no-one can advise without knowing our requirements, but mostly it's just required for centralised file storage, so we can stop having fragmented storage across different servers. Also VM storage is a possibility. I've realised for our price point we arnt going to get masses of features such as dedupe (apart from netapp), but as long as there is some snapshotting capability that is probably enough. Also, some suppliers have specced a seperate switch, others have said we could VLAN it on our existing HP 5406ZL. Is having the SAN on its own switch generally recommended for performance?

lol dont worry I'm not taking it as gospel, but unless the actual figure turns out to be much lower then my rant stands

Im not surprised they charge that but £100 per performance is scandalous to a school. I can understand charges if its a film club run as a business or something but would it be beyond them to provide a vastly discounted licence to schools and charitable organisations? Doesnt make it right but you can see why so many just dont bother with the licences. And then the film industry want us to feel sorry for them losing a few quid over piracy...fat chance

At the moment, we have SQL running on various servers for various applications - Sophos, BackupExec, Auditwizard, PCE etc. Works well enough but I'm guessing it isnt the most effiiciant method. We will soon be centralising storage with a SAN, and so that will leave some servers, which currently do little more than serve files, free. One in particular is filled with 15k SAS drives, so together with a load of RAM chucked in will be a seriously decent server (and is probably vastly underused by being a file server) So at that point, would utilising that one server for pretty much all our databases be a sensible idea? Because it would give me the flexibility to virtualise the servers running the applications themselves, then just connect them to the SQL server, knowing that it was running on something with fast drives and dedicated. Sensible? Or better not to have it all on one (or 2) server(s)? * I'm leaving out SIMS from all of this since it is managed by the LEA and wouldnt want to step on their toes by moving the database, nor do I want to give ourselves the responsibility!

I've been getting on OK with MDT LiteTouch deployment, can install the OS and apps perfectly. However I am wanting to take an image of a customised machine, because for large deployments, using a custom WIM image will be much quicker than installing from scratch each time. I run litetouch.wsf or whatever it is, sysprep runs fine, the computer reboots as per the task sequence, but it boots into Windows PE and just has a command prompt window, it doesnt even seem to attempt to try and run the create WIM part of the sequence, so I havent even got any visible error to try and diagnose it. Because of that, this might well be too general a question to ask but has anyone had this problem doing a sysprep & capture task, or even if not have you got any tips on doing them properly? Because there seems to be little information on the net compared to doing install tasks

I love those things. The ones that groups used to put on cracked PS1/Dreamcast games were quality too. Not that I ever played any of course, that would be naughty

Actually, I suspect a large percentage of parents would allow it, for catering system use anyway, better than their child continually losing their card.

Each cab has a letter and ports are numbered A/001 for example. Couldnt really be bothered to put which patch panel they were on since it doesnt reallu take very long to look Still have yet to do this in a lot of the school mind. Relabelling probably close to a thousand points takes a while..

From someone who has tried, you dont want to be carrying a full laptop on a bike. So you have the right idea. Assuming you're not travelling across bumpy rugged countryside I would have thought that a standard hard drive would cope? Pakuma bags are really good, lovely padded pocket for laptops, I think they do a small one for netbooks now too

Are you a Sheffield Utd fan? I've always had a soft spot for West Ham for some reason, despite the ridiculous Tevez situation (which they were lucky to get away with) and now the new owners who just cant keep their mouths shut

lolz-worthy. Campbell wound him up good. Doesnt matter how how the interviewee tries to unsettle you, a good journalist stays calm. But he was just angry because his precious tories hadnt done as well as they should have Real dream team of tw@ts on sky news isnt it? Boulton AND Kay Burley

It would be a struggle to dislike him, hes such a sound bloke. Didnt do particularly well at West Ham but I'd wager he was still one of the most liked men in football

ironing? *hides*

Ha, well I had just got the answer to your questions - it is ECC memory and its 600mm deep, not as deep as our Dell ones, not sure what the standard is. In school hours (until 4.30pm) is far better, because out of hours access isnt great, not sure id rely on a caretaker to be on site at a certain time. I could take it home and he collect from there but id prefer not to obviously. Will need a day or 2 to wipe it properly, but anytime after that is great

Ill be honest, I didnt know either. I thought the hard drive was there for storage if it was being used as network scanner, or if someone chose an option to save a copy, I didnt know it systematically stored them. I assume its to increase speed in some way?

Got a server going spare, of a fairly ok spec. The only reason we have stopped using it is because it is 5U and we are extremely limited for rack space. Been a very reliable friend to us for probably 6 years now! Spec is: Dual 2.4Ghz Intel Xeon CPU 2GB DDR RAM 5x 146GB Seagate 10K SCSI drives with Intel RAID card 5U Intel rackmount chassis Dual gigabit Ethernet Dual PSU DVD ROM Drive Free to whoever will be able to put it to use (and not just try and sell it or something!), and most importantly, is able to collect it within a reasonable timeframe - no sending by courier or anything, sorry. We're based in Thatcham, West Berkshire. Anyone?

Its a shame theres such a monopoly with a few companies controlling the majority of festivals, they do absolutely rake it in. Problem is even the independent festivals, as soon as they start getting bigger, no doubt one of the big boys comes in and makes the organisers an offer they cant refuse

Agreed about no sympathy for those who were unable to vote. Well actually I have got sympathy for the few who genuinely couldnt get there at any other time and couldnt get their vote cast. But lets be honest, the vast majority of these people only have themselves to blame for leaving it so late. The polling stations are open for 15 hours, how many people work for that entire time? Very few. Its not rocket science, the process has been the same for as long as anyone has been around. I just think people are getting stupider. Another point, how on earth can you end up with long queues at a polling station anyway? If its being run efficiently, surely the turnaround is very quick, number is checked, person votes, pops it in the box, leaves. That whole process shouldnt take more than a couple of minutes at the absolute most. So perhaps theres also an issue that the problematic ones were poorly run