OverWorked

Like R2D2 projecting Princess Leia's recorded message to Obi Wan?

I don't know if this helps you or not. Officially we're not allowed to order online either, but we get round it by me writing out the purchase order, getting it signed by the Head and Finance Manager, then ordering online, quoting the purchase order number in the ordering page or email. Misco and other have a field on the order form for purchase order number, which they print on their invoices. Others probably do the same. We don't actually send the paperwork to the supplier. The supplier gets the online order they prefer, and we get the paperwork in order for the files. I agreed this with our finance manager a while ago and it works (as long as I don't add a bit to the online order).

Working up the courage to ask out a 16 year old girl who also had a summer job at the factory. Never did, though. Recently I met her younger sister (now in her 30's), and told her about it. She thought it was hilarious.

Aw... I feel like a grandad. I was 18. It was the summer just before I went to Uni. The long summer, full of youthful promise...

Just to finish this thread: I've tested both switches and the cable seperately and can't find a fault - they're all good. I've even replaced the cable with another 30m cat6m and the problem's still there. The gigabit switches work well on their own and with other switches, but join them together and traffic in one direction in 0.5Mbps at best. I've connected the cat6 cable to a 100Mbps switch at the main cab and I'm getting 70-80 Mbps. I'll just have to live with that. I've given up on this and decided that the two gigabit switches simply don't *like* each other.

I can remember what I was doing exactly 20 years ago, when it was 08-08-88.

Playing music just makes it worse for me. I can't concentrate. I made the mistake once of putting the TV on. Then realised I'd spent a whole afternoon watching a Laurel and Hardy film. I love it, though. I'm not looking forward to everyone coming back.

We can't rule that out. I'm sure that in the past I've found old PCs that have been stuck on shelves for a long period unused with RTCs showing dates well into the future - months or years. Whenever I've seen it I've always thought "Uh Oh... battery's going". When the battery dies altogether, the RTC is likely to default back to a date in the past, usually the date the BIOS was written, so they'll have, say, 1988 for the date. They wouldn't default to some arbitary date in 2010 for example. Finding an ancient PC with a RTC date in 2010 has always meant to me 'low battery'. I've always believed, rightly or wrongly, that when a battery drops its voltage, the RTC can speed up. If HP support agree then that's good enough for me. Can I retract my retraction? I was riddled with self-doubt earlier, but have been bolstered by SOSAGES.

You mean for H&S and security? I doubt it. I have thought about it. ie I'm not going to do any work up ladders. The security is a worry, though.

What's fogging?

It's not just me then. There was the caretaker here, but his leave began two days ago. There's two decorator painting the outside of the school. I've just stuck a sign on the main entrance telling visitors to come to my window round the corner. It's amazing how many contractors turn up unnanounced. They all ask for the caretaker and are surprised he's not here, then expect me to sort them out. I don't mind really. At the moment I'm getting my head around wireless network security - trying to decide on the best solution for us. Lots of reading which I can't do in term time.

Recently made full-time, I'm now working the holidays in the school. As it's a small school I'm the only one here. It's a weird feeling. I've given myself a list of jobs to do and am steadily working through them. This is great - total freedom and no interruptions for "can you show me how to print four photos on one sheet of paper?" But... Not having anyone to talk to is getting a bit depressing. I'm the kind of person who doesn't talk much to colleagues whilst at work. I just want to concentrate on my work. Now they're not here I'm missing them. Anyone else got the whole school to themselves?

Ha! So I hadn't imagined it. A low battery can affect the RTC. Thanks SOSAGES, I thought I was going mad.

I need to make full retraction of what I've said in this thread. Last night I thought long and hard about what I believed of crystal oscillators. I now recall that the problem I had with the oscillator in my electronics project, and the conversation I had with my electronics tutor, was about low input voltage distorting the output waveform, not the frequency. It was a false memory of an event almost 20 years ago. For some reason I've been carrying around the belief of crystal oscillators speeding up under low voltage for all this time without questioning it. It's a good job I never had a career in electronics. As for the CMOS clocks on old PCs with low batteries slowly gaining time: I must have imagined it, based on that false memory. It's funny how the mind works. I've been alone all week, stuck in a empty school, and my mind's going. I need a holiday. Sorry! However, it is possible that the crystal oscillator on your mobo is just bad (it does happen). See these results. In which case, there's nothing you can do about it, except replace the mobo.

I just use Symantec Backup Exec to do overnight backups. The usual grandfather/father/son type thing. I think real-time backups are a bit overkill for a school.

I know it sounds far fetched, and I was expecting such a response, but I've seen it first hand. Way back when I was doing my Electronic eng degree, I had a crystal oscilator on my final year project running fast. My tutor told me I was underpowering it. He was right (he should have been - he had a PhD in electronic eng). I increased the voltage to the what it should have been and it kept the frequency it was supposed to. I've seen several old PCs do the same. The clock starts running fast a few weeks or months before the CMOS battery goes.

It's probably the CMOS battery running down. I lower voltage can make the crystal oscillator run a bit faster. The lower voltage means it doesn't have as far to switch from the top to the bottom of the cycle, making each cycle a little bit shorter than it should be.

David, I thought SAS was faster that SATA. Am I wrong? I agree with the backup solution. I gave up on tapes a few years ago. Too expensive and unreliable. Plus it's another job to do to keep changing them. For backup-to-disk, I have a cheap Buffalo Terrastation (1.5TB in RAID5, I think) way down at the other end of the school in a secure plant room. Little chance of it burning down with the servers.

I also agree with K.C.Leblanc and GlennT. Buy more drives - they're relatively cheap. As you've got 2 free slots, have 4x300GB drives in a RAID5 array for the data and increase your space. You're right to have separate arrays for OS and data. This will improve the speed. (I wish I'd done that. I got a new server with 1TB of space last year and just made one array with several partitions. It'd be a big job to split it into two arrays). For backup I've only used Backup Exec in a working environment. It's good, but it takes a while to get your head round if you're new to it.

I never thought of that. The NICs I'm using are Intel Pro/1000. I'll give the Intel tools a try later. Thanks.

Thanks. I've done my own crude test with 2 PCs with gigabit NICs and tried copying large folders between them and timing the copy with a stopwatch. I've tried several cables and switches, and combinations of the two. I think that kind of test is largely dependant on the performance of the PCs especially the HDDs, which are getting used heavily in the tests. I just wondered in there was any (free) software that could do a better job. I only have one suspect 30m cat6 cable between 2 rooms. It's only £20 to buy a new one, so don't want to spend too much time any money on the testing.

I had a bit of trouble getting it going, but it's worked flawlessly since. First of all, I second what Edsa said. Here's a few ideas:- services » authentication » control - do you get all green lights? services » authentication » settings - is it all filled in correctly? If you're using AD, I could PM you a screen shot of mine. services » authentication » user activity - are users being listed? system » preferences » time - is the clock correct? Timezone should be Europe/London. I just manually set my clock - I couldn't get NTP to work. The RTC in the BIOS should be set to GMT (not BST).

Is there any software which will turn a PC into a cat6 cable tester? Following on from this , I have a cat6 cable I need to test. My cheap connectivity tester reports it's OK, and the lights on the switches and gigabit NICs connected to it report it's running at 1000bps. But it's really slow in one direction. Is there such a thing as software which will run basic speed tests on a cable? I don't expect the full functionality of a hardware cable tester.

I've only recently discovered The Daily Mash. I have that and BBC news on RSS. There's a great one today. BBC (you don't need to read the whole thing) Mash

@srochford: thanks. I'd already tried that, and it seemed to work for a while and the problems came back. This suggests that the problem may not be DNS related at all - I may be barking up the wrong tree. (Aside: Whenever I've had trouble with AD, the cause has alway been DNS related. A DC needs DNS to be able to find itself! Once I logged onto a 2003 PDC as domain admin, tried to access GPMC, and was told it couldn't find the DC - scary at the time. Fixed it by adding a root domain DNS entry). @cookie_monster: I've gone with the 'point them both to the PDC' option. I'll monitor it to see if the prob comes back. Thanks everyone. The problem's gone away now. netdiag and dcdiag showing no errors. I'm not convinced it won't come back, though!