Sephiroth

I noticed this specifically during Tuesday. I think our issue might have stemmed from the change to BST though, so possibly not the same thing.

When did you notice this happening? I've just corrected a very similar issue with our 3 DCs where one would occasionally just jump ~20 minutes forward, completely messing up any clients using it at the time. it would correct itself as soon as anyone logged onto it. Running he above commands on the non-PDC DCs seems to have resolved it though. Edit: I've also changed our main external time server to time.google.com. I don't believe that this will have had much effect, but I've been meaning to do it for a while.

Server upgrades put me in the joyful position of having several RAID controllers laying around, not doing anything some time ago... @Blue_Cookeh I do that with drives that are so far gone I can't even DBAN them! Used to do it in the office, but stopped when I got told off for putting hammer shaped dents in the [concrete] floor.

Yeah, good point. I keep all hard drives in storage until they're sent off to be securely shredded (physically), so isn't really an issue for me. can you not have a similar setup with Acronis DriveCleanser though?

What I do is use a desktop that boots to DBAN on a flash drive and autonukes [DoD 3 pass + blanking] all disks attached to it. I've got 2 raid cards in it to maximise capacity. I take all disks out, chuck them in the machine and leave it overnight (or longer in the case of the 8 4TB disks that I was doing last month!).

We used midspans as an alternative to poe switching for a campus that we took over. Same brand as these and we've had no issues so far. We got fully managed ones so we can turn off ports remotely. http://m.comms-express.com/products/microsemi-24-port-poe-midspan-10-100-1000baset-ac-input-w-management/

Yeah, if that's all you're using it for it makes far more sense to do something like that with the idea that it's only temporary.

The costs for me are roughly £50pcm for electricity, but that includes wireless, switching and filtering, as well as the 2TB of data on my file server. Looking at some prices, I'd need to spend ~£100pcm to get the basic services (on a single instance, not spread out) and still have to host the file server. As far as doing dev goes, I have the flexibility to just roll up a fresh server for a specific purpose (exactly as I would on the cluster at work) and play with it however I want, without having to pay out for another instance.

At the moment I use a DDNS address to point to my BT (yeurk! Only went with them to get the line installed as it was free from them and nearly £200 from others) router. When contract renewal comes around, I'll be going with Plusnet as they'll give me static IPs, then buy a domain name from my preferred registrar. As far as mail servers go, I'm using the open version of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite. Due to DNS names not being what I want, I'm only using that for junk at the moment, but the last school I worked at used it for both staff and student email accounts. It's quite a powerful product.

Great thanks. I'll have a proper look when I get home.

Hi all, I'm hoping someone with a bit of pfSense savvy can give me a hand here... I've been using pfSense as a firewall and gateway solution at home for a while now, and so was the obvious choice for filtering now that my kids are getting to 'that stage'. Particularly as there are lots of disturbing things on the internet. I've got Squid set up to be a transparent proxy and everything is still working, and I've got SquidGuard running and have set up some category filters there. Problem is that I can either filter all devices or none. There seems to be no differentiation between devices. I know that I can turn off transparent filtering and point clients that I want to be filtered to the proxy, but I'd like at least 2 different levels of filtering, so that won't really help me. What I want to be able to do is to have devices put into groups by Squid, based on subnet/ip range and authenticated user (probably AD; possibly RADIUS, I think I can figure that out, though I've only glanced at it so far) to get the categories for filtering depending on the order of groups, much the same as I do with my Smoothwall UTM at school. I'm open to the idea that this may not be possible, though I hope it is. With any luck it's just me being a blind idiot! Thanks in advance!

I run something not too dissimilar to @Davit2005: VMWare hypervisor (Free version), definately not low power! dual 8 thread proc's and 32GB RAM, running: pfSense firewall/filter Secondary DC File server PBX Print CCTV server MSSQL server Mail server WDS/MDT Minecraft Server [*]Physical DC (AD, DNS, DHCP) [*]FreeNAS iSCSI storage server for all VM storage, including file server [*]Backup server, just hosting a CIFS share for inbound connections All servers are rackmount. 2 24 port patch pannels feed a 48 port layer 2 managed gigabit switch with VLANs for WAN, SAN, Wireless, Clients, Servers, Printer, Phones and management. I have a Netgear wireless controler and 3 WAPs running my wireless access fed from a 24 port PoE Midspan. Also from the midspan are 2 IP PoE VOIP phones. I then have a 3KVA APC UPS (currently out of service until I can pay an extortionate sum for some new batteries!) to power the lot for ~40 minutes. All this housed in a 24u Rack and consumes somewhere in the region of 700 watts. Most of what I have is repurposed stuff from work that was going in the bin, so I've been quite lucky with that. The things I've not been able to get are hard drives, for obvious reasons. The Windows server licences are 'loaned' to me for development, as I manage the entire network at work and do a lot of development at home which then proves useful or necessary at work. For example, when we upgraded our domain and were looking at adding a new DC, I added one at home to learn how to do it and how it works. Same with MSSQL and file services. We work on the understanding that I will continue development that is of benefit to the school, and I benefit from hardware and software to run my network

I'd do it in powershell like this; $Users = Import-CSV -Path "\\Path\To\File.csv" Foreach ($User in $Users) { $Username = $User.Name $DirectoryPath = "\\Path\to\directory\containing\$Username" $UserPerm = "ShortDomain\$Username" New-Item $DirectoryPath -type directory $acl = Get-Acl "$DirectoryPath" $permission = $UserPerm,"Modify","ContainerInherit,ObjectInherit","None","Allow" $accessRule = New-Object System.Security.AccessControl.FileSystemAccessRule $permission $acl.SetAccessRule($accessRule) $acl | Set-Acl "$DirectoryPath" } Using a CSV with a single column titled 'Name' with usernames in it.

We use NXPowerLite to reduce filesizes of documents and images across our file server estate. They also do a MS Exchange version to reduce the size of mail attachments. I then use a custom Powershell script to call Handbrake CLI version. That moves all video files to an archive directory (in case things go wrong [haven't done so far!]) then encodes them with the iPod profile to the original location. that's saved masses of space alone, as we have video going back decades when VHS tapes have been transferred onto the network!

As unpopular as it may be, this is my opinion. I don't see why we should be trying to 'prepare' for OFSTED in the hours/days/weeks that preceed the visit. The whole point is that they inspect what is actually happening, not what we want them to think happens. On the same note, also unpopular is my opinion that OFSTED shouldn't give any warning what so ever; just turn up and inspect a real day.

Sorry, no. Should be $Computer. Corrected on my post. That's what the service is on all my clients, supported by searching online... can you run the script on localhost? Forgive me potentially asking stupid questions, but have you changed $Computers to contain valid pc names?

Would look something like this: $Computers = @("RemotePCName1","RemotePCName2") $Hive = [Microsoft.Win32.RegistryHive]::LocalMachine $KeyPath = 'Path\to\reg\key' $Value = 'ValueInKey' Foreach ($Computer in $Computers) { Get-Service -Name RemoteRegistry -ComputerName $Computer | Set-Service -Status Running $reg = [Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey]::OpenRemoteBaseKey($Hive, $Computer) $key = $reg.OpenSubKey($KeyPath) If ($key.GetValue($Value)) { $Result = $key.GetValue($Value) $Txt = "$ComputerName - $Result" $Txt >> C:\textdoc.txt } Get-Service -Name RemoteRegistry -ComputerName $Computer | Set-Service -Status Stopped } I've added in checking if the value exists. The if statement will error if the value doesn't exist, but should just carry on without printing to the file.

I do. I can't say that it's secure or best practice though. You could try running the following at the beginning and end of the run for each remote machine: Start-Service RemoteRegistry Stop-Service RemoteRegistry I don't know that it'll work properly, but as far as I can tell, it should.

To enable remote registry, I would recommend Group Policy: Computer Configuration > Policies > Windows Settings > Security Settings > System Services Find the Remote Registry item and change the Service startup mode to Automatic Reboot the clients Then this PS script should work: $ComputerName = 'RemotePCName' $Hive = [Microsoft.Win32.RegistryHive]::LocalMachine $KeyPath = 'Path\To\Key' $Value = 'ValueInKey' $reg = [Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey]::OpenRemoteBaseKey($Hive, $ComputerName) $key = $reg.OpenSubKey($KeyPath) $Result = $key.GetValue($Value) $Txt = "$ComputerName - $Result" $Txt >> C:\textdoc.txt

Are you looking for the contents of a key or a value within a key?

My manager emailed them this morning and just got a response. Apparently they're releasing a full map at the beginning of next week. We'll see what happens!

Our main servers are running from dedicated drives in RAID1, however, I do have a development server running very happily from an 8GB flash drive. As others have said, the cost of the higher tiers of VMWare are prohibitively expensive, but I can't see the need for anything smaller than a large MAT to get more than Essentials plus. The real issue comes when you need more than 3 hosts, but I would still argue that the cost is worth it for the ease of management in that environment over Hyper-V (admittedly I've not used either in an environment though).

Offhand I don't know what we paid (it was about 3 years ago), but I can see pricing on VMWare's site for ~£500 Transfer/upgrade is as easy as getting a key from VMWare and putting it into your host. It'll then give you all the new features.

Try running gpresults on an affected machine. I've had policy objects in the past that just leave unknown registry changes when removed. This might at least give you somewhere to start.

VMWare ESXi Free is very good and feature rich for a free product. It's also upgradable in future if you do find money for it. We have 1 Essentials Plus and 1 essentials licence. Essentials is actually not bad pricing. 1 thing to note though is that the free version of ESXi doesn't have any of the backup APIs in, so getting VMs backed up is a complete pain (something I found out after I set mine up at home!). As has already been mentioned, you will still be required to licence your windows VMs with an appropriate licence.