morganw

Anyone else just being informed by their LEA that they might be fined £500,000 if Google Apps data is found to be outside the EU?

I found that the free version of LanSweeper does have a report that just gives hostname and motherboard. Exactly what I was looking for. I was looking for the word 'motherboard' in a a report, but found what I wanted with a 'baseboard' report. Thanks to everyone for the additional suggestions, I can recommend LanSweeper to anyone and the full premium verison looks really cheap too.

I guess the worst I could end up with would be files uploaded into Moodle that the database doesn't know about so they would be orphaned if I had to do a restore, but as you say the chances of it happening are minimal. I've found it pays to be paranoid though, the SAN is running RAID6 for my peace of mind but i'm trying to get a backup strategy that is the best it can be in the unlikely event that it suddenly bursts into flames. Thank you for the advice by the way and info by the way. Always keen to do more through linux and similar.

I would go for a) but I also need to backup windows servers and don't want to install anything like cygwin. Are there no permissions I could modify to allow the rsync daemon to stop apache? I guess I can automate a VM snapsnot as well to try and get a more complete backup if it can't be done.

Out if interest, was does 'set -e' do? And what does invoke-rc.d do that is different from using /etc/init.d/apache2 stop I'm am using Debian (Lenny).

I'm looking to pull from the servers to a backup server, rather than push onto a backup server so the backups are queued and don't overload the SAN (all servers except one are virtual). I'm thinking about backing up things like Moodle, I can dump the database in pre-xfer exec so it's up-to-date, but I wanted to stop the web services and so that someone couldn't be using it and modifying things while the file backup is running (as the the database would then be out of sync with the data). Or should I not worry about that happening?

Any idea why I can't stop Apache and MySQL from pre-xfer exec, but I can start them? The rsync daemon is running as root so I thought it would work. I've tried through inetd and running it directly from the console.

Thanks for the suggestions, i've got spiceworks installed but found it a bit hit-and-miss for detecting workstations, I've looked at WinAudit which worked but I'd have to do lots of work / scripting research to get combine the outputs. I ended up going for LanSweeper which seems pretty good, it got 350ish workstations out of 530ish which is about right considering laptops and some pcs may have been turned off. I can't get the output in the ideal format but something pretty close. I'll have a look for Inventory.vbs though as maybe I could get the output exactly how I want it.

If it were me I would be looking at free virtualisation software and trying to do a physical to virtual conversion instead of a hardware swap. Then you end up with something that is portable across any hardware for the future. In fact I would be tempted to re-setup from scratch with one VM per function so that you could scale it across different hardware in case of performance problems or the need to expand. Also gives you more backup and failover options.

I'm getting ready to rebuild onto a new domain but unfortunately don't know the exact hardware that is in use, it's mostly older RM stuff that I need to ID so I can start making the build images, gathering drivers, etc. I'm looking for something automated and lightweight that I could run as a CC3 package and compile a list of how many different motherboards I've got. Most of the graphics / sound are onboard, but some some PCs have a failed onboard network adapter so it would be good to also locate where there are network cards installed. Anyone know of anything that can do this with a minimum of effort (just write the relevant data back to a shared text file or something like that)?

Check out your wireless router (assuming you have one). When I logged into the web interface on mine I found that it had a blacklist / whitelist functionality built into it, past that if you want something more automated you would have to go for something with dansguardian running in it, like this Endian - *Open Source Firewall Appliance - UTM Linux Security Distribution* edit: just realised you asked for local install only, ignore the second suggestion The router settings would be useful though if the kids had access to more than one PC as you have central control through the router.

Are there complications because of a change to the licensing system? Does this now need a dedicated license server rather than just an import of the .lic file?

We should have been sent the email notifying of this last week, but only received it today after complaining that our Google Apps services had all been filtered. Even if I had seen the email I wouldn't have realised that 443 would be blocked for every Google service. I'm a bit stuck now, I've spent the last our testing squid rules, there doesn't seem to be a way to stop Google SSL searches without also stopping Google Apps. The both use the same domain name and the same port number. Are there any options to work around this?

Do you mean that the first time you tried to use msqldump through a pre-xfer exec script that it dropped the tables for no reason?

...just found them I think. pre-xfer exec and post-xfer exec. Amazing what you learn by reading the instructions. :-)

I'm looking to backup a Moodle installation running on one virtual server, and a Joomla installation on another. I've tested rsync to pull the data from one, then the other onto a physical backup server which works with no problems but ideally I don't want to have the MySQL databases pre-dumped in order to back them as they won't be in sync with the data. Is it possible to launch a trigger a script by initiating an rsync connection or would I have to make use some kind of remote execution script that would do all the prep work beforehand, then initiate the rsync connection. I want to keep it as simple as possible though so somehow getting the rsync daemon to dump the database seems the ideal way to do. It seems logical to me that something like rsync would have a pre and post transfer command option.

All fine now, it must have been a drive fault but it didn't have a warning light, siren, or anything like that. Just made everything start to hang and crash.

The domain is based on 2008 R2, with some 2008 for when 64 bit isn't appropriate.

Is there a good 'I don't know anything about Radius' guide to setting this up somewhere?

Thanks all, looks like it's getting turned off then.

I think this would be useful but would have to offer a flexible build of the wrapper. Some people might want the to use SFX style self extractors and packages that included icons, I decided to use MSIs to install (to give an easier option of an uninstall) and Group Policy Preferences to generate icons / remove icons on computer startup. It would be high maintenance as well, someone would have to keep updating the wrapper blueprints for each software revision. The AppDeploy repackager tool allows you to share MSI blueprints but i'm not sure how popular the tool is. To be honest I think that until there is an opensource application virtualisation system there will always have to be a lot of duplicated effort because everyone's needs are slightly different.

I use .cmd files for silent command line installs... Free Windows Installer - MSI Installer Tool ...and the unregistered version of this to make an MSI if I need one. It also has a repacking wizard although I (try to) only use that to investigate which registry keys are modified by an installer.

Just setting up a new domain with the entire being that all the software is setup to install automatically with no manual configuration so that we can reimage PCs instead of wasting time fiddling with settings. If I disable the system restore the entire rebuild process is under 40 minutes including big installs like Adobe CS3 master collection. With system restore turned on the process is more like 2 hours. Since the workstation setup is now designed to be 'disposable' I think the faster rebuild time is worth disabling the system restore. Apart from not being able to roll back a problematic WSUS update (which shouldn't happen if the updates are tested before being approved) is there any reason to have it turned on?

You could use AutoIT to launch the install, wait for the final window, then automate keyboard commands to press the 'Finish' button. Something like this... Automation with AutoIT Tutorial: Part 2 | Technibble

You could try using a bootdisk to fix the master boot record to see if that was corrupted. Is the client you are imaging the same hardware that the image was captured from? I've made images on VirtualBox and and XenServer which seemed to deploy with no problems, but if you are having problems try capturing and deploying to the same PC to see if your problems are server related or not.