saundersmatt

We are using Impero and are very pleased with it. Support is also excellent: We were having some issues with it monitoring websites on our vista clients (we were aware that vista support was not guaranteed at the time) and in order to track down the issues we had an Impero developer visit our site twice. Matt

Altos G330 Mk2 Altos G330Mk2 Xeon DC E3110 3.00GHZ/1333FSB/6MB, 1GB DDR II 800, DVD, NO HDD, NO FDD, EURO power cable, PS2 Mouse, 1xLAN Gbit onboard, NO KB, EasyBuild 8.0, no ASM, 1 Year On-Site + 2 Year Carry-In Warranty NBD . TT.G3BE0.011 GBP 45.15 1. As a base for you hagglers out there the above is the LIST specification and price. Matt

Just thought that i'd echo yuor sentiments. Run Vista, really on modern hardware there is no problem at all. You're going to have the gpo configuration headache when you move to Win 7, might as well tackle it now for Vista. Matt

"I'm glad I spent it with you..." Cheers, going to have that in my head all day now! Matt

Good for backups or something similar. As fas as I'm aware though openfiler doesn't support iscsi clustering, so if you're looking for any kind of failover it's a no-no. Matt

Ahar, so you managed to have a speak with Chris Page at BETT then did we? That would be my school you are talking about that is using it for SIMS It is an absolutely fantastic piece of software, makes deploying any applications, and upgrading them an absolute snap. We currently have circa 200 programs availabe through it (and have 3 which we are unable to deploy with it, successmaker, digital blue movie creator and dartfish.) In response to the OP, streaming will work with any application, but it is especially useful for large apps. Office 2007 for instance is over 2 gig in size, but you can get from no Word/Excel/Powerpoint on the workstation to a usable app in about 30 seconds. Any more questions feel free to ask. Matt

Check the file ownership of the files as that's how quotas work, they need to be owner by the respective user. If you or another tech has copied files to their user area these files may be owned by you. Matt

I checked that at home the other day, it's actually quite excellent. Where on earth did they find all those pictures of Meerkats? Matt

We don't get 'refreshed' until easter mate. But i'll let you know if ours are laying around then. Matt

What on earth do you want a load of celery's with 256 meg ram for? Matt

I think DMcCoy was referring to the pushprinterconnections.exe (or Print Management Console) method of deploying printers, where as you are describing the GPO Client Side Extension method. But you are indeed correct with the tick boxes you describe. Matt

I noticed this with Vista, you need to use the built in profile copying functions, doing it manually like you always have with XP doesn't work. Control Panel -> System -> Advanced System Settings -> User Profiles, Settings -> Copy To Good Luck Matt

It's one or the other. Deploy using group policy just adds the appropriate to a hidden section of the GPO, you have no control over removing printers, or defaults etc. Using preferences, you have finite control over which machines/users the printer is deployed to. Since an exe needs deploying either way, you may as well deploy the gpo cse and use preferences for the extra features they give you. We've had for more problems making XP work the way we want it to in a 2k8 domain than we did vista. Roll on the upgrade cycle I say. Matt

Are you talking about using group policy prefrences or "deploy with group policy" from the print management console. We use group policy preferences to install printers, which is pretty good, however we had major issues with vista clients. We have had to revert back to vb scripts to map printers to vista workstations. It works flawlessly on XP however, you can specify which printer is the default. Combining this with item level targetting makes it very powerful indeed. It would be interesting to see if you had any joy using this method on vista clients, if you have any. Matt

Hi guys, was just wondering if any of you could suggest any bright ideas to increase network redundancy in our Hyper-V setup. Our initial setup (get it up and going fast) is as described in network plan original.gif, which consisted of a 4 port trunk from one blade switch module to the core switch, and each port of our iscsi san plugged into the other switch module. Performance wise this setup worked great, but reliability has been an issue, occasionally we’d get one or the other blade switch module freeze up which meant that either the virtual servers died as they couldn’t see their disks, or disappeared from the lan. We purchased another new, identical switch module hoping that there was perhaps a hardware fault, but the freezing issue remains. I set about working out my ideal performance/reliability setup, which is outlined in network plan desired.gif. This consists of two 4 gig trunks, one from each blade switch module to the core switch, and the san directly connected to the core also (meaning it can be access from more than just the blade servers). Each blade server would have a load balanced trunk with failover, iscsi and lan traffic being kept on separate vlans. The eventual plan would have been to buy more switch modules and network adapters and have individual trunks for lan/iscsi traffic. However, due to incompatibilities between the Broadcom nic trunking and hyper-v this setup does not work, no way no how! The failover trunk works absolutely fine on the host blade server, and will pass vlan’s until there’s no tomorrow. As soon as you make the trunk available to hyper-v, failover stops working on the trunk and you cannot attach a virtual server to a specific vlan. We've currently had to settle for a mismash of the two outlined above, a trunk from one switch module to the core for network, and another from switch module 2 to the core for iscsi. This no more resilient that our initial setup however. So, any bright sparks want to suggest anything that might make life a little more reliable, we’re currently experiencing a freeze at least once a fortnight and it is beginning to drive us a little crazy. Thanks in advance and sorry for the length. Matt

No, it's a little office 2 doors down from mine. My office is much bigger and has far more computers in it Matt

Tesco after work was far more amusing! Lol Damn I love my handywork. Made it all my little self. Matt

Cheers, you're all making me feel a little, um, special.

Anybody else dressed up like an idiot for no reason?

Each of our nodes is a blade server with 2X dual core 2.8ghz cpu's. Currently running at 5gig ram each. Local drives are mirrored 73ghz sas. Each node will happily host about 5-6 servers (usually varying in ram from 512-1024meg, ram being the limiting factor). I allocate around 20 gig for an os drive and then whatever is needed for data etc. to another virtual disk. I only use the single box for testing, so it doesn't require much disk space. Get as much as you can afford at the fastest spindle speed for your supported interface. RAM wise i'd go for at least 8gig though, that's what's in out upgrade plan for next year if the budget doesn't allow for a complete replacement. I'd also recommend that you look at putting server core or just hyper-v server on the box if you've got another 2k8 server to manage it from. Matt

We're currently running all our live server on a 6 node hyper-v cluster with storage on a san and another single host running with local storage. Hyper-V doesn't explicitly require a san, it's only clustering and subsequent failover features that do. Any more questions give me a shout. Matt

Oh my god, how do you manage the which Chipet/Architecture/Technology is better arguments? Matt

I wouldn't trust a goon in a phone shop to update my phone, rather do it myself! Don't worry too much about running the same firmware, it would appear that your product code is different to mine, is it network branded? I've known different branded yet same version firmware perform differently before. Matt

I've got an N96 which isn't experiencing lockups. I'd third the recommendation for doing a firmware update, just follow the instructions at Nokia UK - Phone software updater. I'm currently running software version 10.065, there is an update available to 11.101. I do know that on the original n95 there were a lot of freezing issues which were fixed with firmware updates. Matt

What is up with not being able to exclude a port range in the gui or via netsh? I need to exclude a range of ports that is over 16000 items, adding them scripted via netsh takes approximately 1 second per port, or 4.5 hours total runtime, not to mention 16000 individual entries. I just cannot believe it is that daft. Matt