cogrady84

The main purpose of a UPS to my mind would be providing clean, uninterrupted power to expensive hardware. You don't want a brownout or a surge killing things... clean shutdown and uptime is secondary. I have an unmanaged UPS connected to each of my switch stacks, the aim isnt to provide uptime, just to ensure no failures occur due to a power problem that is out of my control.

You say that like i'm the only person in this thread who likes windows 8? -_-

If that's all you want to take from it, then so be it. However, for some people, that is the case. There are compelling arguments both for and against, but some people seem to just jump on the negativity bandwagon, instead of formulating their own opinions. I have experienced people buying new hardware and being told to take it back because its running windows 8, even though they haven't used the OS themselves... grinds my gears. Windows 8 has alot to offer, and it should only improve upon that in time.

I find it quite nice to get a quick "at a glance" look at all my live tiles, showing me the latest formula 1 news, stock portfolio updates, recent search trends, current weather, netflix updates, news etc... I guess it's not for everyone, but I find it quite handy I fail to see how your going to solve this problem of having to press an additional key during bootup, by migrating to a Unix based operating system, be prepared for much larger headaches!

Windows 7 had way more problems, and was a far larger departure in terms of UI from Windows XP. Yet it is the holy grail of operating systems now, people need to be less scared of change. Its not like your forced to use Metro, a quick tap of the windows key and your on the desktop, as you were... Sizeable performance improvements over Windows 7 in various applications, practically instant bootup, a streamlined GUI, security improvements, cloud integration, superior multi-monitor support (fantastic for gaming/office), far better diagnostic support tools (new taskmanager and performance indicators, file transfer ui), pooled storage, picture passwords... the list goes on... things need to move forward... embrace it!

I really don't understand this mentality... i've been using Windows 8 on my home and office PC since release day, had 0 problems with drivers/games. Your on edugeek.net, keyword being geek... fix your problems? Theres nothing inherently wrong with the operating system apart from laziness and ignorance on the other side of the keyboard...

+1, as vaguely explained in my post, however I like to hide the network just in case a share is incorrectly hosted by someone, somewhere I don't know about. I am not the only administrator on my domain.

I use a GPP registry key to hide the network: (full key path = CLSID\{F02C1A0D-BE21-4350-88B0-7367FC96EF3C}\ShellFolder) Also, even if students could find users home folders, ACL's really should already be locked up tight since creation surely? (automated home creation via AD will apply the correct permissions to individual folders)

Considering this is what you are doing at the moment, would there be any weight in installing FSRM on your file server and creating a file screening rule for .swf files targetted to your student homes? This will at least remove the manual process of removing the .swf files, as they would not be able to save them in the first place?

Ok, could be the missing updates, gonna install and reboot in a few minutes. Thanks!

Hi guys, When my smoothwall blocks a page, instead of showing access denied, it just shows IE cannot display the webpage. This was working up until this week, no updates have been deployed to the Smoothwall recently. I have also enabled the policy "Disable caching of Auto-Proxy scripts". Any ideas? If i look in the real-time web filter, smoothwall is blocking access to the site. This is also now causing major problems on our macs, because the mac thinks the user is failing proxy authentication, so prompts for new credentials, instead of showing access denied.

I've been using MRBS for about 5 years now, very easy to setup and very easy to modify to your needs, lots of configuration options, runs on IIS, PHP, MySQL, highly recommended!

I presume it's not just me who is back to snails pace internet?

Yep, there is a marked improvement this morning... at last! Time to catch up with some work!

Seems even worse today... losing the will to live... hands... tied... slowly... drowning...

Massive problems here in Cleveland, in the middle of setting up a TMG/Smoothwall solution and it's all going horribly wrong because most of the time it's hard to tell whether the problem is the ISP or the boxes i'm working on. Dropouts, failed DNS queries, slow, non-responsive... no timeframe/information from BT, total nightmare since Tuesday morning!!! GRRRRR Got builds for laptops/workstations I can't do because I can't get drivers, 2 firewalls to setup which can't auto-negotiate routing because of the outage, application servers to build and no access to drivers, windows updates to syncronise, AV definitions to update, CAD/CAM software to download, a backup system to reinstall which I need to download from Symantec, DNS updates to make with our webhost, learning support software updates, RRAS on TMG that can't be tested/verified, bios updates to fix WOL problems... YOU NAME IT, I CAN'T DO IT... HELP!?!?!!?! Obviously I haven't even highlighted the 150 staff and 800 students who are also completely reliant upon internet access for communication/lessons...

Had an AV definition auto-update come through once that suddenly started this behaviour... just a small suggestion

I am enjoying some success with simple finder along with a local firewall rule burned into a master image, which can either be done manually or with WaterRoof: deny tcp from any to any 137 out deny udp from any to any 137 out This blocks WINS, which stops my windows clients showing up in shared, not sure what, if any limitations this poses on my macs yet, but I have magic triangle up and running with 10.6.4 and this rule in place, with no problems so far... #watchthisspace

Do you have multiple iSCSI sessions configured from each host for MPIO? Incorrect function usually occurs when the virtual disk is on the non-preferred controller (part of failover testing) and the host doesnt have a path to the disk, either physically or through iSCSI sessions.

Enabling a network for cluster use would only be possible if his cluster was already validated and available for cluster administration I think? Is there a firewall sitting somewhere between/on your Hyper-V hosts? Quick google: "To ensure correct failover cluster functionality, add exceptions to firewall configuration settings for the File and Printer Sharing (TCP 139/445 and UDP 137/138), and Remote Procedure Call (TCP port 135)."

Don't forget to export and migrate your DHCP scopes...

We're running Hyper-V clustered in a Server 2008 Datacentre Host OS. 2x Dell Poweredge R710, one bought last year, one bought a few months ago. (40 CPU's, mixed 5500/5600 series with CPU masking, 112Gb RAM, 16 NIC's total across both platforms). iSCSI connectivity to a Dell PV MD3200i 3Tb SAN, 6x 600Gb 15k RPM SAS, directly attached to support upto 4 hosts at present, can be extended into an IP SAN if required. Multipathing enabled and managed with cluster shared volumes and SCVMM '08 R2 SP1. Currently running 12 HA VM's with various operating systems, failover performance is fantastic and there is as little as ~2 seconds downtime due to a host failover situation. Performed P2V on all of my physical and virtual servers to move them over to hyper-v, which was flawless (TAKES FOREVER). Backups are a breeze with Symantec BE 2010 R3 and we're getting licenses for direct CSV backups soon. *EDIT* - Forgot to mention Livemotion, WOW , and the PRO tools if you ever bother to license them (intelligent VM placement according to situations and load balancing). From what I understand, our solution is considerably cheaper than VMWare and we moved from a single host Citrix Xenserver 5.5 setup to this setup in about a week and a half, during the summer break. Completed the migration from Xen to Hyper-v and all the server/san installation myself, I am unqualified and have had just over a year working with Xenserver, so I would say it's fairly straightforward, even for someone new to virtualisation. The SAN configuration was the most difficult part, configuring iSCSI and allocating LUN's correctly, and testing failover, once thats working, easy street. Good luck, I hope you find the right solution!

Yep, Lapsafe

Hi Guys, We're looking at buying 8 laptop cabinets, with 30 laptops in each. The ones we're looking at, apparently come with a built in switch and "Data Transfer Mode". Does anyone have any idea how this DTM works? I can't find much technical information about it, but apparently it allows you to WoL the laptops and transfer data/updates to them from within the cabinet... We run a Cisco managed network, catalyst 2960 switches, 5407R L3 core, and I am struggling to understand the implications of plugging a 24 port unmanaged switch into a 100mbit uplink to our switching infrastructure, and considering the effective linespeed of said switch, wouldnt it take days to transfer the required amount of data to 30 laptops needing a full suite of software/updates etc?? Would I be expected to daisy chain 1gb trunk links between each cabinet, replacing the standard unmanaged netgear switch with a 2960 so that I can connect it to VTP and have our VLANS spanned across them etc?