nsherin

Watch out for Adobe CS2 products and their obnoxious activation. I've found if you restore a PC from a sysprepped Ghost image, the Adobe Software will require reactivation. Heck, even when I've moved from a single drive to RAID-1 configuration on my own PC or even added an extra hard drive, I've ended up reactivating. Just some gotchas to be aware of when rolling the software out!

350:1, although I do have an AVA technician who also deals with the printer consumables plus keyboard/mice maintenance.

Thanks - several sources I've read - including here seem to indicate that the Beta 2 keys are the ones to use. Will install it tomorrow night hopefully (after Ghosting my Windows partition first ) and will report back with my findings when I get a chance.

Cheers for the link - downloading it now as we speak! I take it my Beta 2 key will work with this (I got sent the offcial Beta 2 DVD a month or so ago).

Not another upgrade! I managed to take advantage of there being very few people around and got all the SIMS workstations upgraded in a day during the holidays. Fat chance of it happening for the September upgrade. The frequency of patches/upgrades is getting beyond a joke. It's as if SIMS is in perpetual beta stage!

Far too much to do - the late running of finishing a new building, plus the network/electical wiring has put me behind schedule by a week. Now chasing around sorting out PCs for individual offices, plus another small cluster of 4 PCs, software for two SmartBoards, three scanners, a SIMS station to finish rebuilding, plus two NetOp installs. Over the summer, I've built some 3 IT suites of 21 PCs, installed a small cluster of 5 PCs, hauled kit to our storeroom or for disposal, stripped down a room whilst it was recarpeted and then reconected it all again, moved the last two servers from NT 4.0 to 2003 Server. The total order of PCs from our supplier was 102! I had a weeks holiday at the end of July to beginning of August. After being back two days from it, I needed another one!

VMWare is great for this sort of stuff. I do a lot of testing/tinkering with network OSes in my spare time and have put 2GB of RAM in my home PC. I'm going to upgrade to a dual core chip soon, so this should make VM sessions run a bit more smoothly. Much easier and neater than having a bunch of PCs round the place and I just 'power up' the VMs when I want to use them.

I'd make sure that you have your gateway configured propery in your network card's TCP/IP settings - that's likely why you couldn't see the internet. Static IPs are the way to go for servers. Agree with E1uSiV3's comment on <2000 boxes not taking too kindly to DHCP - we had some odditys with our Windows 98 clients when I put a DHCP server in last year, so decided to exclude part of our IP range for these. Can't remember quite what the problems were, but giving them static IPs solved the problem. Not that I've got many 98 clients left now, thankfully!

It is indeed the dbattach command. But as you say (I must learn to read ), you'll soon hit the limitations you mention.

BrowaeControl is excellent - we use it at the school I work at and I've just created different containers - i.e. 'Rooms' and placed the PCs that show on the the console in the relevant places. Seems to work a treat and I've also shown a couple of my colleagues about NetOp policies - handy if they just want the kids to access a restricted set of sites for a task.

I've got batch file I was given by our LEA SIMS support team at work for backing up our SIMS SQL database by zipping it up to an archive directory, which I then write out to tape nightly using Windows Backup without any special SQL agents. I think it uses one of the backup utilities as part of SIMS (but it's likely you can copy the utility onto another server and use it). I'll dig it out on Monday and post the code here for you.

Shouldn't be a problem - if you're going S-ATA or P-ATA RAId, I'd recommended using a plug-in controller card, as opposed to onboard RAID, so that if the motherboard in your server or the plug-in controller goes, you can easily swap out a replacement controller and still have access to your RAID arrays. Incidently, my 3 servers at work have 2 S-ATA RAID arrays and LTO-2 tape drives hanging off the SCSI controller in each of them. I've also run SCSI / IDE on my personal system at home a few years back without any problems. In fact, I once had a plug-in ATA card, plus the two on-board ATA channels and a plug-in SCSi controller in the same box which all ran OK.

Hi, Neil here from Portsmouth. I'm the IT & Network Techie at Priory School in Portsmouth. Approx 280 desktop PCs - soon to become 380 and a mostly Windows 2003 Server AD network with about 5 servers - the last two NT 4.0 boxes are being moved over next week to 2003. No laptops - laptops are dished out to staff and they are then their responsibility, but don't go near our LAN.