mikedoubleu

Hi laserblazer, Unfortunately, it isnt simply a Micro SD card reader. It is a game cartridge that has a ROM on it that allows the loading of games from the SD card. Its probably not going to be a great help to you, but their is a stall at our local market that sells them for a tenner. Otherwise, I guess anywhere on the internet that sells console mod chips could sort you out. Thanks Mike

Well... I... ugh... just dont know what to say. I would like to say that he brings up some valid points, but I really dont think he does. In fact, I'm not entirely sure that column should ever have made it on to the internet (or in to a newspaper) It's not that he hates Mac's - some of my best freinds hate Mac's - but that he provides no real basis for it aside from a generalisation that all Mac users are pretentious d***s Or am I missing the joke here

@albertwt Ah, so if ESXi was installed, then it will have deleted the Dell utility partition. I guess if tis is the case, the problem will be that on the old server will have the windows partition as #2 but the new server will have it as #1 You could try: Pop a boot CD such as Hirens or Ubuntu in and loading a prtition editor Delete all partitions on the new server Create a single primary partition as #1 on the hard disk with a size of 100MB or something small Re-doing the restore, making sure Symantec will not remove the primary partition you just created Reboot and pray Otherwise, tmcd35 is quiet right, bung a Server 2003 (SP2 if possible) CD in the drive and run a repair on the install. This is almost definitely going to fix the problem as it will correct any entries in the OS that point to the wrong partition number. Cheers Mike

OK, there are two main things that could be causing this: Partition order Drivers Firstly, is there a recovery or management partition at the very beginning of the disk on the new server? If so, delete it. Once thats gone, try doing your restore again. Sometimes when there is a recovery/mgmt partition on the server, it forces the Windows partition to adopt the wrong partition number and leaves you with an unbootable system. I appreciate that the old server has one of these partitions too, but Symantec may be trying to take account of this and incorrectly assigning partition numbers. You can use a recovery cd such as Hiren's, ERD, or even Ubuntu to find and delete the partition. If that doesn't fix it, I'd be fairly certain it is going to be either a raid/scsi/ide or chipset driver that isn't being replaced by the Symantec tools correctly. If all else fails, it may be worth considering installing VMWare ESXi (its free) on the new server, and then using the free VMWare Convertor to turn your physical server in to a virtual server on the new box. This is all but guaranteed to work so if you need to free up the old server quickly, its an option.

The Pentium Dual Core is a Core2Duo processor. The only difference will be either lower bus speed or smaller cache memory size. The current Celeron processors are either Core2Duo or Core2Solo with lots of the features locked out and very small cache memory. I previously benchmarked my Core2Duo 2.13 against a freinds Pentium Dual Core 2.2 and the difference was very small in day to day use.

Hi steele_uk, Where abouts are you based in the UK? Mike

Hi albertwt, Sounds like a real pain in the rear!! I don't quiet understand what you mean by "the restore process". Are you trying to move everything from the old server to the new server, or are you trying to set up Exchange on a seperate server and keep the old server as the domain controller? What software are you using for the restore process? If you are trying to seperate your exchange server from your DC, the safest way would be to: Install Windows Server 2003 on the new server Add the server to the domain Install Exchange 2007 SP1 on the new server with all the latest updates Move the mailboxes to the new server using the Exchange management shell/console Create new send and receive connectors on the new server Redirect mail delivery to the new server Uninstall the old Exchange from the old server It may seem like a long winded process, but it will leave you with a much cleaner install If you are wanting to decommission the old server and move everything over to a new server, I'd still recommend running the two servers side by side and making them both domain controllers and both exchange servers (as above) and when you think everything is finally using the new server, then remove exchange and dcpromo the old server out of the domain. Hope that helps Mike

Hi RJones, Our configuration pretty much echo's what Maniac's does for staff, but we also give students roaming profiles. A lot of our student in the college need their own profiles due to the nature of the courses, and we find that group policy prevents them from breaking too much :-) The layout we use is as follows: Staff Roaming Profiles -> \\server\staffprofiles$\%username% Staff Personal Documents -> \\server\staffhomes$\%username%\Documents Staff Personal Desktop -> \\server\staffhomes$\%username%\Desktop Staff Personal Pictures -> \\server\staffhomes$\%username%\Pictures Student Roaming Profiles -> \\server\studentprofiles$\%username% Student Personal Documents -> \\server\studenthomes$\%username%\Documents Student Personal Desktop -> \\server\studenthomes$\%username%\Desktop Student Personal Pictures -> \\server\studenthomes$\%username%\Pictures We also map an O: drive for all users that points to the root of the home drive, so \\server\staffthomes$\%username% or \\server\studenthomes$\%username% I've actually set up seperate group policies for Windows Vista and Windows 7 to allow folder redirection of the additional supported folders in those operating systems, which works better than having a shared group policy for XP, Vista and 7 Hopefully thats of some help Thanks Mike

I'm afraid I'll have to add my vote for Proliant servers and ESXi (if it needs to be free) too. If you could stretch to purchasing some shared storage, then all the better. I appreciate that ESXi doesnt have the largest feature set of all of the virtualisation hosting platforms, but imo it cant be beaten on reliability and ease of use. We are currently running 8 HP blades with a HP SAN and aside from a minor bug in the SAN, we have had ESX running solidly for a year with no problems at all. Mike

Hi Duresthar, I have to second what everyone has said about a tool that keeps track of where users are logged in and represents it appropriately. It would be so nice for me to be able to select a user and it give me the name of their current client machine and even what they have been logged in to previously. I imagine it wouldn't be easy to pluck this out of the domain controller, but a VB script that runs at login and reports back to a database would work. Maybe as an extension to this, I'd really love a program that will periodically check in with each switch on my network and keep a record of where all computers are plugged in. Most managed switches provide this facility but all of the programs I have found that can do it (particularly HP Procurve Manager Plus) cost an absolute mint!! If you could combine the above, you could feasibly have graphical representations of where all your users are in a building :-) I personally would love something that monitored when a computer had last received the group policy objects from our domain controllers. At the moment we have an issue with user profiles and client computers that have been messed up by an old version of the Novell client. Novell is now completely off our network, but its like a virus popping its head up every now and then, and this particularly issue causes some client machines not to download the latest group policy. Hope thats helpful Thanks Mike

Hi Spik376, I think the cheapest method for you would be using a VLAN capable switches at each end and then a router to handle the communication between networks. You have three networks, so you will need to assign 3 VLAN's: Admin Network - iprange - VLAN1 Curriculum1 - 10.68.4.x - VLAN2 Curriculum3 - 10.68.44.x - VLAN3 You would then put an appropriate VLAN capable switch ad fibre module at each end. I guess your using single mode fibre to make the link so a HP Procurve 1800-24G on each end with HP ProCurve Gigabit-LX-LC Mini-GBIC (J4859C) to connect to the fibre. Now you can "untag" port 1 on each switch to VLAN1, port two to VLAN2, and port 3 to VLAN3. Port 24 would be connected to the fibre and have all three VLAN's "Tagged" on it. At this stage, you have an ethernet port for each network at each building. You can connect this port to the switch for each relevant network. This gives you the ability to transmit each network over the fibre, but no way to route data between each network so you will need some kind of a router. If your existing router onsite supports multiple VLAN's or has enough managed ethernet ports, this would do the trick. Otherwise any router (or routing switch) with enough ports should be able to cope with the job. Hope this helps Mike

Oh, the address is Open-AudIT :-)

Hi Andy, If you can find a little space on one of your servers, or put together a small Linux server, you can use Open Audit. It is a fantastic piece of free (open source) software that will get everything you need and more. We use it to successfully audit 1000+ machines at login to give us up to date information on hardware, software, and user logins. Thanks Mike