tmcd35

First line had me in stitches! Had to turn it off - decided it's NSFW, I'm downloading the album when I get home.

Or maybe he realised that going after Sony and Nintendo in the console market is draining enough of their coffers, going after HBO and Netflix (let alone bigger more established players) is suicidal. This is part of the bigger MS turn around since Balmer left the top job. They seem more inward looking and focused on their core business instead of chasing markets they'll only ever be third run players in. I think some analysts are surprised he never choose to pin off XBox completely.

This has been in my calendar for the last month or so. Can't wait to here the new tracks, Al's a genius!

Mmmm, Might forget iSCSI then and stick with SMB. I could always set up a nightly Robocopy between servers for backup, AFAIR VSS allows live VHD's to be copied this way (I'm sure I've done it). Not the instant on solution at failover I'd like, but manually re-pointing a VM's VHD location and rebooting is quicker than rebuilding hardware and restoring from backup.

Set up a hardware firewall/router to join this separate LAN to your existing LAN only allowing traffic through on Port 80 redirected to your proxy server. An old PC with a couple of NIC's running Linux should do it. I'd also think about using something like Deep Freeze on the PC's so any configuration changes students make in the control panel, etc, are lost on reboot.

Thanks @localzuk, that's just the kind of discussion I'm looking for! Tiered storage is a worry, albeit a needless one (as in I'm probably making it needlessly complicated). I have to start thinking of how many of each kind of disk is required, their RAID, total capacity, which VHD's are stored in which tier, etc. Since we're talking about 10-16 spindles regardless, and 15k drives shouldn't be that expensive on the budget, I almost favour the JBOD method. Trow the disks at the server and sort it out later... Reading up on Storage Space and it appears 2012R2 has add in the ability to use SSD's as a write-back cache. Now, that is interesting. Reduce the number of SAS drives and introduce some SSD for cache. Question is how much SSD cache would be appropriate? 10% of the total array size? more/less? I think I'm favouring Storage Spaces over traditional RAID because of the flexibility it brings with growing volume sizes. It's the Windows answer to ZFS, and that sounds really useful in a VM environment. We currently use SMB v2 shares for everything. Moving to SMB v3 would be a simple upgrade for us, that said I wonder if introducing iSCSI and Cluster Shared Volumes would be more beneficial for our virtual hosts long term? Better fail over support? I was thinking of moving our core file data (home drives, public, etc), away from an SMB share on the file server and into a VHD headed up by a VM? I'm now wondering if that might introduce a bit of a bottleneck? A couple of DFS shares between old and new server might be a better solution for user data? In terms of the old server - I just don't want to get rid of it. Also our file server is the single point of failure at the moment. It think something along the lines of CSV and/or DFS is the answer to the redundancy problem. Anyone know if VHD's can be run from within a DFS share?

Mmm, wonder if I miss-explained the purpose of this thread? Not really looking at quotes at the moment. Was hoping for some EduGeek expertise on the implementation side. Storage Spaces vs RAID, iSCSI vs SMBv3, sort of thing. My current thinking is to implement a JBOD with Storage Spaces. SSD looks too expensive, 900Gb 15k SAS drives look inviting. The question is how do I partition and advertise that space out, and how do I repurpose my existing server for redundancy? Also what kind of CPU/Ram would people recommend for a storage server/SAN controller (Windows 2012 based)? Also, if I go SSD for the OS, first is there any real point in doing that, and second is it really worth while going for two mirrored drives for the OS?

Also, a car ban actively prevents an individual from engaging in an activity, driving a car. Data retention doesn't in or of itself enable or prevent anything as far as the users of the service are concerned. What it does do is provide a mechanism for relevant authorities to gain additional information that may make or break a case along side more traditional methods of investigation. That said, I think I might need to go and glance over the proposed bill again as I feel I might have missed something in relation to surveillance powers.

How much are these drives? 5x200Gb is 1Tb without redundancy, about 1/5th the actual total space I'd require as a minimum. Are SSD's still too expensive for mass storage? Anyone using SSD's with Storage Spaces?

Sorry, that's primary as in main, not as in type of school - lol. We're current'y 700 pupils and around 300 devices. We have plans to expand out wireless network in the coming year and look closer at the pupil:device ratio. We're a secondary school years 7-11. Currently sitting on around 25-30 virtual servers. Our existing file server is about 4-5 years old so it's now time to look at replacing it and looking at best current tech to do it with. Not sure if a full blown SAN is the way to go or what £7,500 is likely to buy us.

Lol, you're going in the wrong direction! I'd be happy with 4Gb Ram!

Just got a very appealing quote for @ICTDirect_Dave. He's kindly allowed me to share the specs for more discussion: My first thoughts are to (atleast) half the CPU and Ram and up the hard drives to 15krpm. Our current server is quad core, 6Gb Ram and 16x15k rpm 450Gb SAS drives. I then got thinking about the RAID controller. What do I want here? Do I even need a RAID controller with Storage Spaces? And of course the questions over SSD's. And drive allocation - OS vs Hyper-V store vs Home folder file server. Should the home folders be moved into a VM? Should I move to iSCSI instead of SMB v3 folder shares?

I need to start thinking about a new server for September. A bit different to my usual servers whose spec's tend to read "max out CPU cores and RAM". So I thought I'd see what recommendations you guys have. Here's the spec: £7,500 budget. Primary file server. Windows 2012. Data store for live Hyper-V VHD images. Shared folders for public files, home folders, profiles, app-data, etc. Thinking of using Server 2012's Storage Spaces Would like to properly support Volume Shadow Copies and File Server Resource Manager Hyper-V Replica and ReFS would be nice We currently have a File Server running Windows 2008R2 with just over 4Tb space in a RAID-50 configuration. I would like to repurpose that old server to run Server 2012 supporting both Hyper-V Replica and/or DFS shares with the new server. What can/should I be buying for this?

To be fair, the speed and way this bill has been passed is something we should be vocal about. Should Parliament have the power to turn around laws so fast? And if so, under what circumstances? There are three things that worry me about this legislation regardless of it's actual intent: - Relationship with the EU. The purpose of the bill is to re-enact EU statute that has been deemed illegal by the EU courts. - The level of powers given to the secretary of state. When I glanced through the bill the other day it was very much "the Secretary of State can do whatever they please in defining data retention regulations" - The speed in which it progressed through Parliament. One week is no where near enough time for any statute to be properly debated. The core purpose of the legislation I have no problem with, agree with to some extent. The way this has been handled scares the bejebus out of me! One only hopes that after the next election seemingly sensible people like Yvette Cooper can restore our faith in democracy...

IMHO, Labour's Yvette Cooper seems to have the right measure of the situation:

Personally, yes. As I was getting towards the end I did start to worry that maybe I was doing something wrong, that there was some trick I hadn't noticed. The obvious answers meant I'm colour blind or something, then I hit the submit button - 10/10.

A very interesting read. Leads me to one question - what's the answer? Stop using all technology? or regulate the data produced?

10/10 - that was easy

But that's the key, isn't it? It not whether or not data retention is a good/bad thing (which is all this bill is dealing with), it's what are those certain conditions? I found this old Telegraph article while aimlessly searching the net for stats on this topic: How Big Brother watches your every move - Telegraph 3,254 pieces of data per week! on each of 64.1m people. Seriously, that's one hell of a data trual.

Which in turn implies someone has a legitimate reason to go to the effort of writing the script. As in a targeted search. Why would someone do that? Who has the power to do that? The only time I ever go near my Internet logs is when I already have a suspicion of wrong doing. From what I can tell, at the very least RIPA requires an agent with valid concerns to get the search signed off by a superior before the ISP is even involved. So we're not talking live monitoring. No auto submitting logs to GCHQ. Internal paper trails dealing with the request that can be audited and brought before a court of law. Hell, the beeb article was even reporting agencies that will be struck off the original access list in the 2000 Act. I worst this argument is boiling down to "some bored ISP admin might search for somexxxsite.com and giggle at the list of IP addresses".

But that's the point - as you say petabytes. No one cares if you shop online at Tesco's on the third Friday of every month other than Tesco. And they probably have that information already from your club card. Just sitting here looking at my live filter logs scroll by is a great cure for insomnia. So there's an entry in a file on a hard drive in London somewhere that says IP 178.42.37.63 visited torrentbypass.com and 2:30am last Wednesday. Great, good luck to who ever finds it. I really do hope it's useful in combating illegal piracy, maybe 15 lines down there's an entry for CentOS download the proceeded it - doh!

I agree, but I (personally) don't have a problem with the data retention. It seems a perfectly sensible thing to do. The fact is if this law is passed or not changes little other than the question of what data and how long. The problems appear to be in a law passed 14 years ago. Laws get updated, repealed, changed, all the time. Maybe it's that law that should be the focus of public ire. All the arguments I've read so far against data retention appear resolve around it's potential use/misuse. Maybe the law should be tightened it that regard? As you say it's petabytes of data. Even GCHQ have better things to do with their time than to fish through the amount of data that is generated each second.

It's not the data that differs, it's the method of collection. The government already has plenty of data on me, if my web surfing habits are of that much interest . Collection of data is a meaningless distraction. Application of data, now that's something else entirely. If the government feels its cost effective having someone sit outside my house logging my comings and goings for no other reason than to keep a log, good on them. I only have two questions for them - why do they need to know when I arrive home, and who has access to this information? I got stopped a couple of months bike driving home. Was asked where my journey started and where I was heading to. All drivers on that stretch of road where stopped and asked the same to questions. Did I think invasion of privacy? Or did I think traffic planning? If the law says - "police officer must apply to a judge for a warrant to access ISP held data", no problem. If the law says - "rent officer can randomly access database to see what times I'm at home", I have a problem. I don't have a problem with the data retention, just the data application.

But the question isn't any of those things, it's Internet data. If we were talking about setting up a government agency with the express purpose of logging all postal mail communications I might have a different attitude. I take a more pragmatic approach. What data is being collected? How much data is being collected? Is the data being collected anyway? The last question is key. It's not as if the ISP's need to do anything other than make sure they don't delete the logs they're already collecting for billing purposes. EDIT: The problem I have with the bill is more to do with the lack of definition on data being collected and the Home Security having sole powers in defining this. Of course you can, you just did! You've just sighted two access examples. The question isn't whether it's right or wrong ISP's keeping the data they're collecting anyway a little longer. The question is should the local parking authority have access to it?

Personally I feel the issues need to be separated. From what I can see, and as I mentioned previously, most complaints actually have nothing to do with the law in the OP. Rather they relate to a 14year old piece of statute that is actually being tightened by this new legislation. There's a lot not to like about this story. Our relationship with the EU. The way bills can be rushed through parliament. The seemingly unchecked unilateral powers being given to the home secretary to define data retention regulations. But I don't think privacy is one of them. Ignore who has access to the data for a second, that is a separate issue covered by the previous act. The question is should ISP's be compelled to retain logs for a predetermined length of time to aid in legitimate criminal investigations? I'd have thought any reasonable person would agree to that? I'm sure we can all think of scenarios where police investigations might benefit from such data - paedophilia, terrorism, etc. Personally I don't see the difference between this and what we do with our internal filters. The separate issue is who has access to the data, how they gain access, etc. That is covered predominantly by the 2000 RIP Act. I can understand questions and grievances aimed at this. Although a quick scan of the Wikipedia entry didn't throw up anything I thought was particularly frightening I'd happily bow to more knowledgeable views on this. I also think the economics of scale mean I don't feel my privacy is eroded if some log somewhere has amongst a million other entries for 3am last Friday that I visited bikinilovers.com (made up site, not checked, if link is live may be NSFW).