sidewinder

Im 8.30-4.30 You do realise thats over 36 hours? lol

I just cant imagine you could get enough power from one USB port for that to be worthwhile in the slightest? Reminds me of the 2xaa ones from poundland - eg useless

Anyone got any experiance of Broadberry SAN's? They've got very good reviews in PC Pro, and the 316S is their recommended SAN, But just wondered if anyone had used them before I contact them

Definitely, yes. Baby steps at the minute. Ideally would eventually like everything virtualised with redundancy, but our usual seemingly unlimited budget is unsurprisingly starting to be reined in, so anything major will have to be planned for a year or so in advance, if we could afford it at all. What I'm looking at here is consolidation of some member servers, and capacity for future non critical servers. What does worry me slightly with the entry level SAN solutions is potential lack of bandwidth...for example the ReadyNas only has 2x1Gb ports which seems slightly limiting to me, but then again I've not had any experiance with iSCSI so perhaps that is more than enough. Either way, for the reasons above, fibre channel or 10Gb is almost certainly out of our price range for the time being Noted, will make sure there is an extra quad port NIC or 2 Definitely. From what you and others are saying, I think its probably worth keeping my DC's & fileservers physical for now, which isnt too much of a problem considering the file servers were only replaced last year anyway.

That is something I need to trial tbh, I've heard good things about it Oh and while this thread has been really helpful, its also given me a bit of a headache - I neglected to mention I needed to make the decision within just a few days as the finance is coming from this years budget rather than next years...

I'll be honest, I'd never really looked at the ReadyNas before, but it does look very good indeed. Those who have one, do you run it like a SAN on its own network behind the main one, or just on the same network?

I get it several times a day, other times the ads load. Not sure if the system isnt perfect or if its the LEA proxy

Thanks for the advice guys SAS isnt out of the question, I have a reasonable budget, but there would have to be a trade off in capacity. Then again, even with 4/5 servers its unlikely I'm going to need 4Tb especially as they wont be file servers. Was thinking of going for RAID6 rather than 5 just for some extra protection since if 2 drives failed it could potentially take out multiple machines. Or is that OTT - considering that one of the benefits of virtualisation is portability...could always move VM's to another server as a temporary measure

I havent played it for a few years, it just gets far too addictive. I do like it though. When at college, we used to do big multiplayer games on our days off. Literally used to go for 12-15 hours a time

cheers So you dont have any performance issues storing the VM's on a NAS device? If thats the case it may well mean I'd be fine with SATA drives

LOL

Speccing a new server that is intended to virtualise a few older servers, and provide capacity for a few new ones. Looking at a Dell R710, 2x Xeon E5540 2.52Ghz, 24GB 1066Mhz DDR3, and as for drives? Thats the bit Im not sure on For the last few servers I've started buying SATA drives to save money as they provide adaquate performance for a file server. But should I be looking at 10-15K SAS drives for this, or stick with SATA? Capacity is still important, we dont have a SAN, so there needs to be plenty of space, though I'm not planning on running any major file servers or big databases on any VM's, would rather keep them to physical boxes (or would they be ok?) Also is the initial spec too high/not high enough? Its all slight guesswork at the minute, because although I know the 2 servers I want to migrate to it (print/sophos and my PCE server) I dont know what will be needed after that. I would like to virtualise one DC, as both of ours are out of warranty and could do with replacement. I've seen arguments for and against this, so whats the consensus? I would still keep one on a physical box. Finally, is Hyper-V as good as MS say? I havent got any compatible (spare) hardware to try it out here. And VMware is a bit beyond our budget I think, especially as none of us have much experiance in it

Of course its a well known fact that all real terrorists announce their intentions on Twitter

Most people dont file their work on the desktop tbf Mine is attached

Aha. Makes sense, since I usually copy. When restoring I restore to a different location, then copy the file over with a different filename just in case they still need the original

I'm not sure whether something is perhaps wrong with my setup, or its just the way things are meant to be. When I put a file into someones folder, it doesnt inherit the permissions of the parent folder, therefore if I forget to manually set permissions on it, the user cant open it. I'm sure in the past I've been able to put files in and have them get the correct permissions, which is how I thought it was supposed to work - am I wrong or is something set up wrong? Its not a huge problem, as it only occurs in the odd occasion such as file restores, but its annoying

How about a whos who then for those of us not in the know?

lol, i meant mine was definately a monitor problem. Yours on the other hand does indeed sound like a PC one!

ron - its strictly a monitor problem, not the PC sysman - yeah thats what it is, but how is it set to auto select? im sure ive changed the inputs before but unless im being thick i cant find it now - theres nothing about it in the OSD

Probably quite a simple one. Some of our Dell screens go into standby as they should. Others come up with 'self test feature check' bouncing around the screen. Not only is this annoying, it wastes power because the screen never goes into standby. Mine didnt use to do it, but since I changed some monitor settings yesterday it does. Cant see an option to disable this 'feature'

Can you not create a power plan in control panel settings>power options? You can set time to sleep and hibernate, so I assume setting to 0 would turn them off? Dont know if you need server 2008 for it to work though

Sorted! I didnt actually realise, at some point I'd obviously linked 2 VGA leads rather than find a longer one when I moved my PC. Replaced with one, problem solved Guess I cant really blame Windows 7 for that Forgot about refresh rates not affecting LCD's as well, fair point. And yes, wish I did have DVI! Worst thing is, I think we bought our computers just a tiny bit too early - our computers are pretty much the only ones in the school not using DVI (since theres no port)

Ok changing to basic does seem to have stopped the flickering. But im still getting the ghosting. Went to try refresh rates again, its now taken the option of 72 away from me, set it to 60, and setting it to 75 causes it to go all fuzzy and hurt my eyes - should be the other way round surely! Very strange

Ah ok Ill try Aero basic, I suppose it is a 4 year old integrated graphics card so isnt exactly the beefiest. I did look at the refresh rates, that was my first thought too. It would only let me pick 60, 72 and 75 and the ghosting was pretty much the same with all of them

Just one of about a million niggly problems Im having with 7.... Using a Dell Optiplex 745. Windows used its own display driver when I installed it so I thought no problems. But its not right - if im doing something in a window I often get the taskbar or other windows flickering like an epileptics worst nightmare. Also had the display black out the other day and a message saying the display driver had crashed and windows was reverting to a default or something. Resolution stayed the same though Also theres a really annoying ghosting effect, sometimes it cant be seen but on pictures its especially bad. I suppose this could be a dodgy VGA cable but it was always ok on Xp so it seems unlikely. The display adapter is listed as 'Intel Q965/Q963 Express Chipset Family (Microsoft Corporation - WDDM 1.0)' Ive had a look on the intel website but as far as I could see theres no generic chipset drivers for it, and the 745 isnt officially supported by Dell on Windows 7 according to their website so theres no updated driver there. The odd thing is, my colleague has an idential computer, yet hes not getting any of these problems. Ill have to look at what driver is being used on his. Any ideas?