jamesfed

Hi all, Does anyone have a spare 3.5" HP rack mounted server blanking plate that they would be willing to part with? We've just got in a new HP DL165 G7 and it only came with 3 plates and as we will be booting over iSCSI so no need for any disks at all. Have contacted HP and they say contact a reseller So if anyone is willing to part with one I would be more than happy to put a donation in for postage and tea! See photo for an image of one of them. Thanks, James

Take a look at the Aerohive kit as well - worked out best for us because at the time it was one of the few Wi-Fi solutions that didn't need a controler to work (although you do still have one to perform updates and so on). Works great with 802.1x (if thats what you are into) and coverage from their N class APs are great.

No problem Do keep the whole formatting dosn't destory data thing just incase you ever need to do some more serious burning

Im sorry but are you 'formatting' the drives to erase the data from them? When I say erase I mean securely the destory the data so that no one can read whatever was on them ever again because if so a simple format won't cut the chase and you need to use something like Eraser to properly destory the data. If not do ignore this post!

This time its Microsoft who are kicking out the guideance- Download details: Microsoft RemoteFX for Remote Desktop Virtualization Host Capacity Planning Guide for Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1

All showing as out of stock Guess I'll just have to keep waiting I've got one of the new Zotac Zboxes with the AMD E-350 APU in it - so 6Gb/s going to be one meeean machine.

Where did you get your Vertex 3 from? I'm still waiting for Dabs.com to get them in stock let alone put it in my new AMD Fusion PC

Only just noticed this today when I was looking through FreeNAS and OpenFiler - going to make my next Hyper-V deployment a lot easier!

Thin Clients are low cost, low power consuming devices which are used to connect to VDI and Terminal Servers. VDI is where you create virtual machines of whole operating systems and then use a connection broker to allow users to connect to those virtual machines (e.g. VMWare View/Citrix XenDesktop). Terminal Server is a feature of Windows Server (2003/2008 ect) and allows mutiple users to connect to the same PC at the same time but with each user connecting to a personal 'session' - this way multiple users don't interfear with each other.

WinPE is your freind here - you can get it as part of the Windows Automated Installation Toolkit.

Considerd doing the same to my Asus R2H (simlar kind of era) going form 1.25gb to 2.25gb RAM and 40Gb 1.8" SSD (already had a high cap battery) but instead I've finaly settled that I'm going to put it on eBay in a week or so - I just couldn't justify the upgrade as now that I'm out of college I don't have a use for a tablet anymore.

OCZ Vertex 2 again here - you only need a vertex 3 if your mobo supports 6Gb/s SATA.

DL385 G7 - AMD Opteron 8 core HE processor - its 2 U just like the DL380 G7 but with a lot more CPU power I'd be looking at a few higher speed 10 or 15k SAS drives for Server OS and more IO intensive applications and then a few of those 500Gb drives for your user data. Add in Server 2008R2 with SP1 (for Dynamic Memory) and you are onto a winner!

Got a Vertex 3 on the way from Dabs the moment they get one Going to use it in my desktop PC at work which I reguarly run VirtualBox on - can't wait!

Yeah that should be fine - only thing I would worry about would be your choice of Hypervisor - as far as I understand the MicroServer uses AMD RAID (compared to something like a HP P410i) so VMWare/XenServer might not have the drivers for it - Hyper-V works fine though

Might be a bit overkill for your needs but I'd suggest you take a look at a SAN and going virtual again. The SAN on the grounds of with that number of students you could come accross a situation one day where you need to expand your storage easily and with the VMs as it will make you more flexiable in the future should your schools IT needs ever change. Also do you have a rack or if no the space for one (even if its just 15U)? Again maybe a bit overkill but a pair of HP DL165s (8 core high eff and maybe 8Gb of RAM) with a Qnap Nas in the background for your SAN.

As with many things the speed of the PC is determined by the hard drives and the RAM - unless accual processing is needed the processor has very little to do. As such what workload are you looking at running on your 2008R2s?

I'd go with it as well - go with 2008 64bit as best as you can and it will make your R2 upgrade a lot smoother (compared to going from 2003 to 2008). If you are looking at VMing your network then 2008 is certinly the thing to use as well with Hyper-V being built right into the OS and the intergration compontents coming pre installed - it makes for one easy life.

If its a particulary large project I will usaly hold something back for one of those who lost out on the big pot of gold- e.g. we did a primary school up with new tech a few weeks ago - bought the desktops/server/lics from one company and then got the new network switches from another. In smaller projects though I do hate saying 'thanks for all your effort but not this time' but like others have said - its just the way of the world.

Why not just set the machine to go into stand by after 5 mins of inactivity? It can be applied through the energy management GPOs and works on Windows XP+ (may need client side extensions but not too sure).

Oh no RM has gone out of business - what a disaster! *returns to real point* In what manner would you be looking at the software company going out of business? Lets say SIMS goes out of buisness and that means no more security/software updates - is that such a big problem? I would say something like a hosted solution (e.g. Live@Edu) suddenly being turned off would cause some problems but as far as software that is hosted on site I don't see that the company that supplied it to you going out of work would have any impact on your DR plan.

Little out of my area of expertise then Time to do some googling I think.

Any ideas on what PHP code to use when looking up the users first and surname? Here our users login with their initial followed by their surname so displaying the logged in username kinda looses its effect. (Wordpress hosted on PHP using IIS with Windows Auth enabled here)

Have been wondering whats going on with iPlayer for a while now - trying to get the latest on Libya.

Just a simple check - is the user account you are logging into the PC a local admin on the machine?