morganw

Yeah i had the same problem witrh the quick image, the patch does fix it, but i couldn't get it to install either. I just manually edited the files, it's only two lines you need to change i think. You don't just replace the file though, the patch is designed to modify not replace. I'll see if i can find what i changed...

sounds like a kernel issue. i was using an old workstation as the fog server for a while which would push out a 17GB image in 14mins, moved it onto XenServer with 1GB RAM and 2 x 2GHz cores, decent network card - images now takes 7 minutes. Uploading still takes about 35 minutes as i think the client does all the compression and can't compress fast enough to be limited by network or server factors. Nothing should be taking hours though.

check the permissions on /images and /images/dev, and check you've got .mntcheck files in each too

from memory, load up the management interface, fog settings (top of screen), pxe boot menu (left of screen) i've found this section a little flakey on occasion occasional getting a TFTP error when setting the passwords, but normally a long delay and a success message, or just instant success. Part of the problem for me may be that i'm running behind a proxy so parts of the management interface don't work properly causing delays when i click on menu items. The general advice when having password issues seems to be to set everything to the same password intially. There actually of lot of places where passwords need to be reset if you do this: fog user account on the operating system fog user for management interface storage node password pxe boot menu there are also the .php configuration files, one for general config, and i think a seperate one for multicast settings. ...i think anyway, it's been a while since i moved it to a new server and had to find them all.

What happens if you image to another instance of virtualbox? Does the networking work then? I've only ever made images on the actual hardware, I would guess that issue is down to the driver initally being installed on a fictional nic to start with. I've never considered building images on virtual machines before, i guess it's a good way to keep a library of pre-syspreped drive images though.

We've been using Google Apps for nearly a year now, used to be on RM Easymail. Initially there were a few issues with some members of staff accidentally deleting their emails as they though that gmail labels were the samething as folders - so they would label something and then delete it instead of archiving it. You get 66% discount on postini security and filtering products too as long as your grand total bill for the year is over £2000, which doesn't sound that cheap but actually compares well to other services with filtering and 7GB of storage. Performance wise it'd only ever been down a couple of times and it always seems to be going a decent speed. I really like it. The best bit is that it has directory sync and SSO funcationality built into the educational version so if your backend structure is nicely organised you could get something that is effectively zero maintenace. I was really interested in Microsofts Live@Edu as well, but for full integration with AD I think you need to invest in MS server products whereas Google was free to try out all the functionailty. Maybe the Microsoft solution would have tighter and smarter integration though. The main issue so far has been setting up other applications and utilities that expect an onsite SMTP server, we are currently investigating a hosted offsite relay as SWGFL block direct access to smtp.gmail.com, we had it working intermitantly for a few months but it seems more reliable to relay the mail first rather than go straight to gmail servers.

We were told to open 443 and 80, so i assume it's on 443.

We are currently looking at options other than the upgrade from CC3 to CC4, are there any recommended companies (or individuals?), preferably around the South West, that could help setup a new network during the summer and provide software support afterwards?

True, but at the moment it's only needed in the Music department which only has about a dozen machines. It's tested out fine, although in the long run I am looking to move back to local scratch drives. Makes it easy to backup and monitor too. Thanks for the pointers, it would be great to see the scripts, but just what you've given me so far is great.

When i was at college each computer had a scratch partition which was used for local temporary storage, the idea being if you were doing audio or video editing you don't encounter bandwidth issues. When a user logged in a folder would be created in the scratch partition with the username and only that person could access that folder (permission denied to anyone else), so if only 10 people had logged in on that machine there would only be 10 folders present. I'm trying to recreate something similar but on a network share rather than a drive partition but i'm struggling to find a way create the folders. It's an RM CC3 network and i have a vbscript which runs as a post desktop application, so it's executed just after the desktop is loaded. The problem is that the folder permissions for the root of the share need write access for all students to create the folders, and when the folders are created those write permissions are inherited onto the userfolder, so everyone has full access. So i'm struggling to find a way to set the top level permissions so that created subfolders don't inherit permissions and just allow the 'owner' full access. Any help would be much appreciated.

We have it. I personally couldn't log into it for about two months aftert it was set up, my colleague the other administrator could usually log in but sometimes not. We were always told that the problem was with the OpenVPN connection to the hosted server, it turns out the problem was that we were given an incorrect URL to access the site. We were given https://hslg5.capita-cso.co.uk/ What we actually needed to type was https://hslg5.capita-cso.co.uk/[insert 3 character establishment code here] Confusingly, when you access the site with the correct URL it instantly removes the 3 characters so it looked exactly the same as going direct to the first address. We have since had issues with the VPN connection dropping so i've got a scheduled task to restart every day. Since then it's been ok, although slow. Slow enough that a couple of members of staff have pointed out that they could do their marksheets on paper, bring then into school, and type them into the SIMS client faster than using the web interface.