Sephiroth

Yes, fair point. I leaned from an old hand and don't refer to it often enough!

It depends on how many more addresses you want. Going to a /22 subnet (255.255.252.0) will give you double what you have now (/23 subnet), between 10.163.0.0 and 10.163.3.255 (1022 usable addresses). This should help, it's what I use to figure these things out!

I don't see this as a technical issue; this is a user training issue that HR processes should iron out as part of the induction/leaving processes.

Just in time for our trainee teachers to read before they decide to take the entire contents of the shared drives to their next placement...

I've done a control this year and checked a few sites prices. I had an Ebuyer basket with components to build a budget gaming PC (sans graphics card - that was an eBay bargain ages ago) for ~ £300. The same components now are averaging £10 less, giving me the same machine for ~£220. The same is true over a couple of other sites, showing me that prices are hugely inflated in the runup to black friday/cyber monday just to then drop them to slightly above what they were charging over that period. I'm over it now I am aware that this has been said before, but I now have proof...

We're slowly replacing our aged analogue system with Mobotix IP cameras. we currently have 5 360° C26 cameras and an external M15 camera covering our rear entrance, which has a colour and a night vision lens in it. We looked at Hikvision and Axis, but we know of other schools that use Mobotix and are happy with it. One of the main selling points is the software licencing is free, so you can have as many cameras as you want connected with no additional cost (except storage). The 360° cameras act as software PTZ, so you can "flatten" the image and move around it just as you would with a conventional PTZ. @TechMonkey We did have a conversation with a supplier last week, who said that the new PTZ cameras from Mobotix are not theirs; I can't remember the company, but I believe that they acquired another company, and these are still licenced under the model of the previous company. Something like that anyway. Just be wary when looking into these. I didn't pay a vast amount of attention as I have no intention of using PTZ cameras anyway, for the reasons stated above. These cameras have various analytics in them and triggering systems. We have them on a 1 fps continual record and record at full frame rate on event; in our case, motion detection. You can have these linked to external devices by relay as well for control of doors, gates, etc, as well as human triggered recording or action.

@ICTDirect_Dave I assume that the NVS300 has an X1 slot, making that a viable option. If you need something powerful, you could go with an AMD Radeon WX2100 with 3 DP connectors, but if it's just to drive 3 screens, Dave's suggestion is much cheaper!

For what you need, an Allied Telesis X510L-52GT would do the job with 228Gbps backbone and 130.9Mpps. Should be a lot cheaper than an HP 2920 too.

Yes, error handling is a very good call. I learned that the hard way with student names containing apostrophes, breaking strings (I now convert all slashes to hyphens and apostrophes to backticks) That's exactly why I decided to go with a database. I export from MIS to database with one script, updating row by row with flags for active, leaver and modified. If that dies, there's only 1 record that is potentially wrong, and due to my logging, I can see where. The other 2 parse the database checking for any accounts that need to be created, modified or removed, and the third creates Exchange contacts with appropriate group memberships (we use Exchange for staff and GMail for students... don't go there!)

Having done something similar with some of my own scripts, I would suggest trying to break each section down and get a series of functions written, and depending on the complexity of what you're doing, separate scripts. Once you get your functions, it becomes much easier to debug. I would also put in some kind of logging if you haven't already as that has saved my behind several times! For reference, I had a script that did a huge number of things regarding creation and updating student accounts, which I split into 3 scripts, created a database to manage data and split the 3 scripts into multiple functions, logging everything to a logfile.

Hi, I'm looking at getting a new SAN, and am currently a little stuck on what to get, so hoping someone here has some experience. I'm primarily looking at Dell and HP, having been recommended a HP Nimble solution but being primarily a Dell house. Can anyone help with the differences between the Dell Compellent, Powervault and Equalogic, and the HP 3PAR, MSA and Nimble devices. I appreciate that this is not necessarily an easy comparison, especially between vendors, but I would appreciate anything anyone can give me For reference, we are a very large secondary school, running with 3 VMWare hosts and a SAN on 2 physically separate, redundant networks. We're looking to migrate to a full 10Gb network for servers and storage, ideally using iSCSI. I'm looking at about 15TB of full SSD storage. If anyone has any comparison of SFP+ DAC or 10Gb Ethernet, I would be interested to know as well! Thanks

I've previously been a huge advocate of the Netgear M5300 and M7300 series switches, but we've recently had a lot of issues with them dropping off the network and getting the VLAN tagging/untagging wrong (e.g. a port marked as tagged is then untagged, and saved. refresh the view and the port is marked as tagged again, but is correct in the PVID screen) and stuck, requiring a reboot of the switchstack. I've also had to really battle with support to get units replaced, hving to either do a swap and wait for the unit to turn up before having a new one shipped, or using the schools credit card as collateral. We had this on 2 M5300s and an M7300 (our core switch and primary router and gateway, the collateral on that was very hard to get past finance!) We have moved to Allied Telesys switches for our 6th form campus which turned out much cheaper than any other manufacturers that we were looking at. There are a couple of minor lingering issues with this to do with PoE coming on before data, but otherwise the migration was flawless. The fans in them (at least the ones we have - GS900 series) are aligned so airflow is front to back, so our cabs are cooler and quieter as well.

Is there a reason not to use Group Policy to dump the files in the right place and create the registry settings? That's what we do. %systemroot%\fonts [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts] ""="filename.ttf"

I've got in touch! I have spoken to them before, but nothing came of it. Looks more promising this time. It is good to have a recommendation though.

You are indeed correct. We're on Essentials Plus, so can only have 3 hosts anyway, unless we upgrade to Standard. This is kind of what I thought. However, it may be redundant if I can't have more than 3 hosts. I can't seem to get anything newer than Intel E5 V2 processors (Ivy Bridge) with a maximum of 12 cores, which is lower than what I need, even with 2 processors, based on what is currently allocated on our cluster. Thank you all, I will have a rethink

That makes sense. My cluster's CPUs are as follows: (vCPUs/vCores total) vmhost2: 26/36 vmhost3: 28/58 vmhost1: 28/56 Totals: 82/150 Forgive my ignorance, but are you suggesting that I need more than 82 physical cores or more than 150 physical cores?

Hi, I'm looking to upgrade my VMWare hosts and am looking at a couple of options, which I'd appreciate a second (or more!) opionin on. We currently have 3 hosts with 2 x 16 core AMD Opteron processors and 64GB RAM connected to a vCenter server licenced for 6 CPUs, serving ~30 VMs. What I'm looking at doing is to replace these with 4 single CPU servers with 192GB RAM. Firstly, would this be acceptable within the licencing? I've only ever seen dual processor hosts on the licence model we have. Secondly, would dropping a processor in favour of 1 powerful one be recommended (based on our stats at the moment being ~5-10% CPU utilisation and ~90% RAM utilisation accross the cluster)? The second part of that is; would you consider refurb hosts, considering that the design is that 2 of 4 hosts would run everything if necessary? Thanks

We use a DFS Namespace for this purpose. We simply remove the old server and add the new server to the Namespace. Nothing needs changing, policy-wise. I appreciate that this won't help you now, but may be something to consider when you've finished this migration and had some time to look at the policies.

I use a logon script to write the follwing to database: username; pcname; date; time; authServer (DC); logged on There's another one to write the same for log off events (the last column changes, obviously). I have then got a powershell GUI to read the data out based on search parameters. It's based on code from edugeek (EdugeekLogonTracker) in the first place. I can provide my scripts if anyone wants them. This works well as you can see how many times within a period the machine(s) get(s) used, or to work out use lengths using logon and log off events.

We have a handful of iStorage devices, some flash drives some 2.5" HDDs and a couple of high capacity 3.5" drives. They are a little expensive, but will work on anything with a USB port as they are hardware encrypted, not software. You can also give them an admin password for when your staff loose/forget their codes. We've been using them for over 2 years now.

Hmm... Might be a short conversation with VMWare next week then!

Just out of interest, does anyone here use VMWare's vSAN? I'm in a position where I need to look at storage and have been looking at this, but can't see how it actually works.

I've had a Leaf now for a few months (15 plate 24KW) on finance. I'm paying less on finance that I was on petrol for the 30mi round commute every day. I only get about 80-90mi range, but what I do is to try to get below 50% charge then plug in overnight. That means that I've always got a "full tank" in the morning. I've been from home on the Suffolk/Norfolk border down to visit relatives in the outskirts of London a couple of times now, and just use the charging facilities at the service stations. Stopped once each way about halfway for 30 minutes with a coffee at the station, then on the way again. Driving long distance in an EV is easily doable (DISCLAIMER: I've not planned routes everywhere, so don't know if all areas are so easy) to places that I've looked at going to as long as you plan your routes and can divert to a service station if necessary. My Leaf has a map of charging points nearby, and I keep a paper list of locations and postcodes for any that the car doesn't know about. However, all of that is great if you have the ability to charge at home. If i didn't have a charger at home it certainly wouldn't be viable for me. I agree that the networks need to get more chargers out there, more to alleviate the issue with concurrent charging, as mentioned above, than anything else. I believe that more thought needs to go into how people in tower blocks or victorain terraces will charge their cars when the government enforces their sale, as I know a lot of people that can't even park near their house, but have to park >200m away. In response to OP, I would recommend getting a petrol as they seem to be cheaper to buy and maintain, based on other comments here, though to be honest, I don't think it'll make much difference. I would also recommend that once you have your car, start looking at what charging facilities are available and hound the council for chargers at the roadside. Then you'll have more options when next you need a new car.

Just as an aside, powershell can send email too with Send-MailMessage ... Send-MailMessage [-To] [-Subject] [[-Body] ] [[-SmtpServer] ] [-Attachments ] [-Bcc ] [-BodyAsHtml] [-Cc ] [-Credential ] [-DeliveryNotificationOption ] [-Encoding ] -From [-Port ] [-Priority ] [-UseSsl] []

It does sound like it could be a VLAN issue. Have you set both VLAN membership and PVID on untagged ports? that tripped me up when I first got hold of them.