ArchersIT

Hi there, I have been reading the various posts on virtuatlising servers and am convinced we should be going down this route to replace our current old hardware, but would really like to be able to chat with some success stories over the phone. Would some people be willing for me to contact them to have a chat through what they have done and the lessons that have been learnt? I am looking to go down the Raid Array rather than SAN and Hypervisor rather than VMware, but would like to talk to all flavours if possible. If you are willing then it would be fantastic if you could PM me your contact details. Many thanks Jonathan

If you have ISA server 2004 you can set ISA to log access. This is done on the logging tab within the monitoring section. Once this is done it will log to text files (by default). The can either be imported into excel (as someone else suggested) or if you know SQL you can use LogParser (free download from Microsoft) to run SQL like queries against those logs to pick out only the information you want. An example of a LogParser query (this one to retrieve all internet activity for a specific user specified as a parameter to a batch file) "C:\Program Files\Log Parser 2.2\logparser.exe" -i:w3c -o:w3c "select * into c:\isalogs\extract_people_all_20090122.txt from 'c:\Program Files\Microsoft ISA Server\ISALogs\ISALOG_20090122_WEB_000.w3c' where to_lowercase(cs-username) = to_lowercase('%SearchNames%') order by cs-username,date,time" I know that wont help you if you dont have ISA, but the AndyD asked how to do it with ISA. Cheers Jonathan

Ok - there are two things that may be relevant here. Firstly you need to get the "Tests and Courses" property. To do this go to properties/search for a property and search for "courses" this should find the relevant property. You then click on this and then add to desktop or class foyer so you can use it. The second step comes once you can see the property. You should have a link at the bottom saying "import content" if not, then this is a SINA option that you can set to make that available. Hope this helps. Jonathan

Please ignore all the buscuit suggestions above - they are all clearly from trolls as the true best biscuit is the Ginger Nut. Jonathan

IIRC SP6a was a bug fix for SP6 which was broken on the first release. Jonathan

Firstly, you can do it all via the scripts that have been quoted, but you can also do it direct in the Users and computers plugin you are currently using. Firstly (before you find anything) make sure that the "Advanced Features" is ticked (it is in the view menu). This will create a few extra tabs on the properties box. One of these tabs is titled "Object". This contains the canonical name of the object, which is effectively the location. Obviously if you want the "Advanced Features" to stay ticked, then you have to enable the save changes mode in the MMC... but that is another story! I hope this helps Jonathan P.S. Sorry for duplicating what was said earlier - I could have sworn that they were not there when I looked!

I am not sure if the query will do what you want, but you do have a syntax error here: should read select grade from table1 where table1.pupilid = table2.pupilid and table1.subject = table2.subject Note the change in the where clause. So, I dont know if the whole thing will do what you want, but that should cure the syntax errors in your select statements. Cheers Jonathan

Is it ISA 2000 by any chance? We had some random problems with IE7 and websites which went away when we upraded to ISA 2004. Jonathan

Sorry - hopefully the attached pic will make it clearer where I mean. Cheers Jonathan

Go to System manager/Recipients/Recipient Policies. Create New Recipient Policy Select Mailbox Manager Settings Give it a name and filter settings (if appropriate). Switch to the settings tab Experiment with the settings you want (on report only!) When happy change to Delete immediately. You will also need to make sure that mailbox management is running and that it sens a report the the administrator so you know it is working. This is found by RMC on the server and selecting mailbox management. Hope this all makes sense - in a bit of a rush at the moment - we get slung out at 4! Jonathan

As with most of the others, we use VirtualPC and stick a VHD on the hard drive for them to use for this. Jonathan

IMO all internet access should be filtered at a certain level. If no filtering is done then, as some other people have mentioned, there may be "Duty of care" problems in the event of an issue. Staff are now filtered the same as students. When the filters were different we kept getting fault calls that the internet was not working as "The students cant see this web page - it is fine on my laptop"! This does not seem to cause many problems. Jonathan

We use exactly the same setup - and yes it is a huge frustration that SMS, WDS, BDM and all the other versions of building software are all slightly different and incompatable. Having said that, we have not had any problems with building machines from the server since upgrading to SP2 (once we had worked out how to turn WDS into legacy mode!). Of course most of the bulk re-builds are done through SMS and most of the bulk builds will happen over the summer, but we have been building 3 or 4 at once with no problems. It may be worth making contact via PM and we can compare notes a bit easier. Jonathan

Please read the fine print on iPlayer - when I looked you could only view downloaded programs for 7 days... which meant that it was not much use for the teachers here. Jonathan

Wierder than that - we have SP3 on 4 test machines - 1/4 of them wont load up the driver for the 4000, but the other will! (All same spec and hardware etc) It is finding the time to take that closer look that is the problem :-) Jonathan

As the other people have already said - the main reason is to reduce the attack profile. In your case where you are not using it as an edge firewall then it may be possible to configure it correctly - but as has already been indicated, loading may be an issue. Jonathan

By default later versions of ISA do not allow web browsing from the local machine. There is a system ploicy you can change so that this will work. I would not recommend running anything else on the ISA machine. Jonathan

I do not believe that the DPA is relevant here. The DPA is about taking the correct actions in respect of stored personal information. IMO the following bit from the computer misuse act is enlightening. This says (in the interpretation section - 17) Because of this our AUP clearly says that once the USB pen is plugged into a school computer then the data on it is subject to the same rules as the computer it is plugged into. Hope this helps Jonathan

I am happy for the new method of picking out the new messages - I was just hoping we could have the new method with only displaying new posts. Jonathan

It does seem as if this will need to be done every time - could this be changed back to the way it was? It obviously knows which ones were before/after I last logged in (to divide the list that way) - cant we just have it not displaying them by default? Cheers Jonathan

Thats fine as a once off - but will I have to do this every time I login? If so this will be a complete pain after a while. Cheers Jonathan

OK - from what you have said, especially: It looks like the routing is sorted. Next is to work out what is going on with the sonicwall. Hmm - not sure that this is necessarily the case - the sonicwall is a firewall so is intended to block traffic that it has not been told to allow. Now - I have not used a sonicwall so cannot give specific advice on how to configure it but... This sounds like this is intended to drop the traffic to that network. While my routers configure a route to 0.0.0.0 of 192.168.10.254 (for example) this is how they specify a default gateway. I would expect a destination of 0.0.0.0 to mean that the traffic should be dropped. So, I would expect somewhere in the configuration of the SW is a block for that network which means it remains blocked even though you have opened the ports. Another option may be that it is just "failing safe" and you need to tell the SW that you are ahppy for traffic to be routed between those networks. Apologies for not being able to give too much advice on the SW - does this give you enough to help you progress? Cheers Jonathan

I had a problem with the images not being displayed during the practice tests. I was playing around to find the problem points with the software and discovered that if I changed languages during the test (IIRC, from UK English to American English) then it would not display the images. Changing back again cured it. Obviously this may be completely unrelated to your problem - I just mention it because it rang a bell. Cheers Jonathan

OK - it may be worth while PM-ing me with your phone number and we may be able to chat through some of the networking. Basically we need to add another couple of items to the picture to make it clear what we are talking about. PC1 - Net1 - TZ170 - Net2 - PC2 Let me assume the following Net1 = 192.168.1.0/24 PC1 - Ip = 192.168.1.1 TZ170 - IP = 192.168.1.2 Net2 = 192.168.10.0/23 PC2 - IP = 192.168.10.1 TZ170 - IP = 192.168.10.2 The first thing to do is to make sure that there is a route from PC1 to PC2 and back again. So in a simple world, on PC1, you either needs to have a DG of 192.168.1.2 or it needs to have a route for 192.168.10.0/23 to 192.168.1.2 Similary, on PC2 you either needs to have a DG of 192.168.10.2 or a route for 192.168.1.0/24 to 192.168.10.2 Now, with a routing device (such as a layer 3 switch) you can complicate the matter slightly. If the DG of PC1 or PC2 is the layer 3 switch, then you can put the route for the other network onto the layer 3 device and it will provide the route to the PC on your behalf. Now, you may run into problems if the routing device is the same for both of your networks. On my configuration, this would cause the routing device to provide a bridge between Network 1 and Network2 and bypass the smoothwall device. This would be a bad thing ;-) I guess the main question is to clarify the state of play of the IP addresses for the PCs and TZ170 and the DG and routing table for the PCs. This may be more than you are comfortable doing in an open conference, so again - feel free to PM me if you want to chat more privately. Once the routing is in a state where it should work, then one can move on to the smoothwall configuration and any logs etc. I hope all this helps. Jonathan

OK - not 100% sure I have your network clear from this - but I think you are saying you have something like : Net 1 - +TZ170+- Net 2 With Net1 being 192.168.1.0/24 Net 2 being 192.168.10.0/23 You have said that you have put a route in place so that anything to go to 192.168.1.0/24 should go to 192.168.10.250. If this is the IP address of the interface of the TZ170 on Net 2 then this should allow Net 2 to know how to reach Net1. You dont mention if you have put a route in the other side to let Net 1 know how to reach back to Net2. Both sides will need to know how to route to each other - could this be the problem? Once the routing is sorted, you will need to ensure that the firewall is allowing the traffic to go through between the networks, but routing should be sorted first. Does this help at all? Cheers Jonathan