alexsanger

We get Sophos lumped in with services from the LEA, so don't know if you're being charged for a license or over the odds for an engineers time to perform the update. We just downloaded the new version, installed it, checked the default policies and let it go. By the end of the day it had picked up all the PCs and we disabled legacy updating shortly after that to force the roll out of 9.5 endpoint. Seems steep to me. If you can, do it yourself.

All very nice I'm sure, but really necessary? Whatever it does, it grinds the browser on my aging home laptop to a crawl. Switching to Bing for the rest of the day. PIA, IMO.

Surely they're contravening the terms of use by installing unauthorised software? If you didn't install it you can't support it - thats the view I take. Doesn't solve your immediate problem though... You could just exclude the My Music folder from synchronisation (if thats how its getting onto your server, or redirect My Documents and configure synchronisation seperately if not done already). Or make it read-only to all but Domain Admins - perhaps a bit draconian, but if they want a computer to manage their idevices, let them buy one. The school provides laptops so they can perform essential tasks for the school, surely? Not so they can have their latest downloads ready to listen to in the gym!

The one thing I really needed after taking over - network topology schematic. Try finding a loopback when you have no idea where the edge cabinet uplinks are - or where the edge cabinets are, for that matter! Oh yeah, and the secret to getting extra funds out of the business manager...

LOL! Now you're making me feel really old! One of the most ground breaking games had to be Elite, originally on the BBC Micro. Hours of my childhood went on trading between planets and dodging Thargoids and pirates. The genesis game for the sci-fi genre - the first where the game reacted to how you played. Will you be a trader, a pirate, a bounty hunter...? Ah, happy memories, and all with 16kb of RAM...

We have something very similar to gybe78 - an 8TB NAS/Storage Server 2003 with Tanberg LTO4 running Backup Exec 12.5 providing disk to disk to tape. Just need remote agent licenses for all the other servers, and specific things like SQL or exchange. You can still get agent licences for older versions of Backup Exec. Tapes are cheap and reliable and easier to cart around/leave on a shelf for 12 months. Funnily enough it was provided by RM (as it needed to work with our outgoing CC3 network) but will transfer easily to the new vanilla network. Not the cheapest solution, but provides a robust, scalable and flexible industry standard backup solution. Highly recommended!

We definitely disallow it. Why do you need a context menu to search anyway?

This pretty much sums it up - never done it myself though. We've always "downgraded" to XP on clients with anything else to ensure consistency. Vista Group Policy in a Server 2003 Active Directory « N3ilb’s Weblog I would have thought that once you've done that you could continue using the scripts - we were in a similar situation with no R2 and vbs scripts at my last place - they work okay as login scripts, but they're not 100% reliable. Then again, the R2 deployment method proved not to be either, so maybe there was a networking issue causing us problems...

The technician at my last place is now on his own with roughly 600 desktops (increased since I left - dunno exact numbers), and I know for a fact that they're not recruiting, just investing in more systems and gear to fill his spare time!

I'll help the staff out with their home PCs - and I'll help them a second time as long as payment for the first time was liquid and red, or distilled in Scotland... Nowt for nowt though - even NQTs get paid better than us!

7 is far more efficient than Vista ever was, but still heavier on resources than XP. Keep an eye on Virtual Memory in Task Manager and see how much is available and being used. If you have upgraded to your maximum RAM (M$ say 1GB is fine for 7 32bit but I wouldn't want to run it on less than 2GB) the other thing to consider could be the HDD. We have some old lappys with 4.5k rpm disks. Perhaps upping to 5.4k or 7.2k would help access speeds and thus caching performance. Once you've dialed back all the pretty graphics, turned off wallpapers, sidebar and so on you'll really need to focus on applications rather than the OS, because as localzuk mentioned, you'll probably harm performance more than helping it. Even in XP, the OS tried to keep regularly used dlls and the like in virtual memory to help speed things up, and I have often found that the OS knows better than me, or third party "RAM management" apps. Try comparing things like Chrome and OpenOffice to your current solutions to see if they make any difference. Which anti-virus solution are you using? Let us know how you get on.

If the array won't repair/rebuild then whatever you do you'll have to replace the disks. Once you've done that and got the server running it should be fine to do exactly what you said, assuming the VHDs weren't corrupted during the RAID failure and copy process. Either that, or restore from backup. Which ever is quicker/easier/you're happiest doing. I guess thats the beauty of using VMs - it gives you options! Personally, I'd probably get the server running, then do a full restore from backup, unless there's a compelling reason to use the copied VHDs instead (which you could always do after the restore).

@ zag for me, the absolute availability you get for resources as well as server VHDs is the winner. No one bit of tin will stop anything from working. With a SAN and parallel file servers running DFS you virtually eliminate any single point of failure. Granted, they are pricey, but the EMC2 iSCSI unit we have wasn't scarily expensive (a 4TB "my first SAN" entry level job), and it gives us a huge amount of flexibility that storage on local servers couldn't. Sounds like your backup solution works pretty well though!

We're embarking on a very similar project, although our goal is a vanilla network. We don't have Exchange, but everything else is similar. We currently have a 4tb SAN, so will be looking at 1 DC, 1 VM controller, 2 VM Hosts for load balancing and redundancy. Your spec of 2x quad core (probably the intel 'i' series, for your green requirements) and 36Gb RAM each sounds about right. If I have the budget I'll be aiming for 48Gb, but we'll see. Pretty much everything except the DC and firewall/local proxy will be virtualised. I've got a couple of companies looking at providing "solutions", so will come back here with estimates, when they eventually turn up, if you like.

I feel your pain, although they were at least using individual user accounts here. You need a plan, and it will depend entirely on the scale of the network and the money available to you. Roughly document what is there now, and where you should be in say 5 years after implementing all your changes, then fill in the blanks with hardware, infrastructure and software purchases and a refresh plan that you can manage on whatever budget you have. You'll find that as you plan what you will be able to do, a logical order should emerge - i.e. sort the DC and AD, then backups, then the core, then the active networking, the cabling, and so on... Include a refresh plan to sustain your model, and outline the benfits to the staff and they should come round. Also outline the cost of a PC in each teaching room as compared to the refresh costs of all the laptops and wi-fi equipment over the next five years. That might change their minds! Here, we've set up a second network just for 6th form so far. This will then expand to take over the whole school over the summer. Everything had to be broken down into managable chunks for budgetary limitations, and of course time restrictions. Good luck - looks like you have your work cut out.

local porn for local people?

FYI, Found an old redundant Netgear router which I configured in under half an hour, and will do the job just nicely until I figure this Alcatel kit out.

Hi Robk The Mac mini will indeed be running OSX server, and yes, those are the exact reasons we need to keep the MAC network separate - we just want them to be able to get out to the smartcache and nothing else. The MAC server is part of a solution being implemented by an outside company, so I'll see if they can configure the virtual NIC. Thanks for the suggestion - we might win an expensive switch to play with out of this now!

Hi CPJITServices, It is indeed a fully fledged Layer 3 switch, as all the routing commands in the CLI reference will attest. Even our Layer 2 Procurve 2610's are capable of basic routing though. Unfortunately, I, the person responsible for programming them, am not yet! There seem to be relatively few people talking about configuring Alcatel gear out there on t'interweb thus far...

We have a small network of MACs which are running independantly of the main LAN. Currently, they connect to a windows server which serves as the router onto the LAN to give internet access. The media department have decided to "upgrade" to a MAC mini server which will manage the MACs completely. Fine by me - we can take out the windows box. The mac mini only has one nic though, but we found the switch in the media cabinet is an all singing and dancing Alcatel OS6850-48 (total overkill!). Only problem is we don't know how to configure it to route to the main LAN. Anyone have any experience with this or similar? I know the Alcatel CLI is quite different from Cisco, but the concepts remain... I've downloaded the 3600 page CLI reference, but am still struggling as this is my first attempt with L3 routing. The switch uplinks on a fibre GBIC, all devices are patched directly and the switch was running in its default configuration. Any help gratefully recieved.

You'd think after ME, M$ would have learned... Nevermind, at least 7 seems to be everything Vista could have been. The %ALLUSERSPROFILE% should point to C\Users\Public (or %PROFILEPATH%\Public) on a Vista/7 machine. CSIDL_COMMON_STARTUP should point to the All Users Startup folder directly. See here for more info.

Has it still got Acer's own WLAN management (interfering) software installed? Can't remember what its called now, but all our Acers have come with a load of utilities that reinvent the wheel. We always get rid of them and let windows just work. If the driver is built into the utility, we'll uninstall the hardware, and during reinstall point the wizard to the inf file rather than reinstalling the full util. Is an OS upgrade an option?

We had a couple of acers with this problem. As we don't have an official WLAN, the reliable work around we found was giving the wireless nic a static IP. Once that was set it always connected. Don't know if thats possible in your situation though...

We got a load of Intel Core2Duo E7500 SFF PCs on Intel G41 boards from Stone not too long ago. We got 5 Year warranties, delivery to desktop and imaging included in the unit price. The PCs'll take most things in their stride, short of Premier Pro video editing, and they can take low profile gfx cards if needs be. We're running XP, but will move to 7 soonish. The guys they sent to set em up were good, and the very few occaisons we've had problems they've sent their own engineers out too - not sub-contracted independants. They even recycled our old junk. Have a word with their education team and I'm sure they'll fit something to your budget. Way cheaper than HP/Dell/Fujitsu Siemens alternatives at the time, and IMO a better product. Based on that I think they owe me a cut! What can I say - they did a good job, so I'll recommend them.

You can't do HDMI to VGA, as HDMI doesn't carry an analogue portion of the signal, unlike DVI. You'd have to get a converter, rather than an adapter. Probably cheaper and easier to go for a second graphics card of some sort, or if you're sure your card supports 3 outputs, get a monitor with DVI - anything better than bargain basement comes with DVI these days - and an HDMI to DVI adapter.