Sephiroth

Yes. You beat me to the response both times!

Is $x a variable or an array? Makes a difference to the answer!

We're currently looking at Mobotix cameras and have bought 4 as a test. They do all the processing onboard and save to either a NAS or an SD card. We're looking at a setup where they store on the card during the day then push that up to a NAS in the evening when no-one is here to complain about bandwidth. I know other manufacturers do similar things but I would also seriously consider looking at hemispheric lenses. We can cover our entire site (large secondary; ~2000 on roll) with about 30 cameras in this manner.

I can imagine that this format does work better in a secondary school. Our policy here is that as soon as a student is admitted and the account created, an email is sent to the form tutor to give them the username and temporary password of the new starter, who is then expected to write it down in their log book. We rarely get anyone here saying that they can't remember their username, which is better than I expected when I made the change from YearSurnameFirstInitial [10BloggsJ].

\\ServerName\.StudentData$[shared]\YearOfEntry\Username AD mirrors this setup to simplify management. Year of Entry is the year that the student would have joined as a Year 7 student regardless of what year they join us at (e.g. a student starting this academic year as a year 11 would be 10Entry) and usernames are SIMS admission number. Partly to ensure unique names but also means that they have to be enrolled to the school before they get an account. We can't be strong-armed into doing it anyway!

I use BGInfo to put this straight onto the desktop of whoever is logged in, using the following script. Set dtmConvertedDate = CreateObject("WbemScripting.SWbemDateTime") strComputer = "." Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2") Set ColOS = objWMIService.ExecQuery ("Select * from Win32_OperatingSystem") For Each objOS in ColOS dtmConvertedDate.Value = objOS.InstallDate Echo dtmConvertedDate.GetVarDate Next

Can I just ask why you want this, as there may be better or simpler ways of doing what you need to do.

I know, right...

I am really excited to see that they are finally doing it (not that you'd guess that I like the game!) after so many rumors and so much time. However, I hope that it is more of a sequel or a prequel than a remake. They will ruin what is widely regarded as their best ever game IMO. I would like to see the original Squaresoft team on this though as the Enix games (again, IMO) aren't nearly as good in many regards. Regardless of what happens, though, I will be buying this. I just hope it's worth the hype.

We used to do this, but it became unmanageable. Apparently there are lots of very similar names in our area. Having 10BloggsJ1...5 is very confusing.

We use SIMS admission number. Ensures that every account is unique, there is no identifying information in the username (fairly important as they have remote access via Google mail and our VLE, both of which use their AD credentials), and means that a student cannot have an account until they're formally admitted to the school, regardless of pressure on us.

Yeah, fair point...

I would cut and re-terminate the cable, personally. As long as the cable is 3 core, anyway, and assuming a difficult run. http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/iec-connectors/7769122/

From experience, it is a very bad idea to use Excel to create CSV files as it adds lots of formatting that can kill the file for it's intended purpose. In my example it removes leading zeros from usernames. Obviously not helpful.

To be honest, the main reasons that I wrote this was that, usually, the fist we know of new students is when they turn up at the door needing to log in NOW. That and last year we had an intake of circa 900 (due to SOR) which I didn't want to input manually. As an aside, I'd be interested to compare scripts to see how others do some of the things that I've fudged

I agree with the notion of Powershell... Mine is by no means flawless, but I have it run as a scheduled task every night to import a CSV (also scheduled to export every night using SIMS report scheduler) and create every aspect of the account (including file shares, security groups and quotas) before e-mailing the form tutor the name, username and randomly generated password for each account. I can't post the full code here for various reasons (mainly the character limit here ) but if anyone wants to do something specific with relation to user account creation or automation, I'll help where I can.

The main reason that I have such a powerful machine is that I run several VMs. I have one Win 7 VM for running Windows applications that I can't get away with replacing on Linux (Outlook...), Testing application installs and running and testing general use (this is built as a standard desktop). I have one for testing Windows 10 on the domain and one each for everything that I'm developing (currently 3; monitoring system; helpdesk/asset management; CCTV server). This on top of image manipulation, running several remote sessions to the servers (at present I have 8 sessions open - Also the reason for 6 screens, I cross-reference a lot!) amongst all the run of the mill stuff. Whist I can understand the ethos of running the same hardware as everyone else, that isn't always practical.

AMD AM3+ FX 8320 Eight-Core CPU 3.5GHz 16GB (2 x 8GB) RAM 4 x 320GB 5200rpm HDDs in RAID 5 1 x 1TB 7200rpm for backups AMD FirePro W600 Graphics card (6 x mini-DP) 2GB RAM 4 x Samsung B1740 17" 4:3 monitors 2 x Samsung S23C650 16:9 monitors (portrait) Dell Laser Mouse Standard dell keyboard All custom built with Ubuntu server OS

Problem with that is that it isn't one disk that has failed. md122 and md123 have lost the segment on sdb and md124 and md126 have lost the segment on sda. What I would try is getting a fresh disk and 'dd' the living bits from the old RAID set onto it and try booting from that.

As far as hardware goes, I'd do exactly what I did just over a year ago (albeit in a secondary school with 2500 users and 1000 computers)... rebuild from scratch as a vanilla network. £5K should go well towards some reasonable spec servers for the network size, preferably 4; 2 VM hosts for HA; 1 physical DC and a storage server. For a setup of that size, I would go with 2 hosts with 2 quad core/8 thread CPUs and 16GB RAM with 2 SAS disks for OS in RAID 1 (onboard RAID if necessary), a storage server with at least dual core CPU and 2GB per TB storage that is needed and enough disks to give ~150% of the current data capacity for future-proofing + 100GB per VM that would be needed (you should never need that much, but again, will allow for more VMs whenever needed). The DC can be anything that will run Server 2012R2. If you go with Server Core install, that would be something like a dual core CPU with 1GB RAM, and an 80GB HDD, but whatever is cheapest. If I could squeeze VMWare Essentials into the budget at ~£500 I would... otherwise I'd go XenServer. Personally don't like HyperV. As far as network admin software goes, I've been developing Nagios/Icinga for a while to fit my needs for monitoring core services and make use of a helpdesk. Given the choice on the latter, I would have gone with GLPI, But I was overruled. Plus anything currently in use.

You could do that as a simple approach, but I didn't think that you could target that to a few users without putting those users in a separate OU. Now I'm curious as to what! You're welcome!

I would say that the easiest way to do this is to create a photography group and map a network drive with item level targeting. On the NAS, create a directory to put everything in (e.g. Photography) and share this. Create a directory in this share for each user using their SAMAccountName from AD and give them Full Control access to their own folder and read only access to the root folder ONLY. Then using GPO, map their folder as "\\$NAS\$share\%USERNAME%" with Item Level Targeting based on the photography group. I can help with scripting this if necessary, but it's not too dissimilar to what I do in some cases. If that doesn't make sense, let me know and I'll try to clarify

In addition to what everyone else has said, the only other thing to consider is how much space you'll need for your VM storage. Assuming that you'll be assigning all disks to storage, with OS on a separate medium, the following configurations will yield these usable capacities. R1+0: 1.18GB R5: 1.89GB R6: 1.62GB R0: 2.16GB This is based on usable disk space of 90% of the drive. My advice would be RAID 5 with a good backup solution.

Without seeing it, sounds like the switch is configured as a router or gateway. Is it a managed switch? Assuming that you still need the switch there, try resetting to factory defaults (if possible), and see what happens.

I second this. I have it running as a VM with a dedicated WAN NIC, and it performs beautifully.