geohanson

We had a similar issue moving some of our core infrastructure from 1GB to 10GB. Just before I started at my current place, the previous NM had an external company swap out old 3Com 1GB core switches with new Allied Telesis 10GB switches. Config was just manually copied from the old switches to the new and nothing was really changed. Over the next few weeks (and months) we experienced more and more packet loss, dropping connections, slow logins and just general terrible network performance. After some investigating with Wireshark, it looked like our WiFi was to blame - sounds stupid but it was very obvious after looking at Wireshark! After reconfiguring our entire WiFi system the issues went away. For whatever reason, these issues had only shown themselves after we upgraded to 10GB and had never been an issue before. I still can’t quite get my head around it but it was very strange!! Might be worth trying wireshark and see if you can see any obvious issues.

We’ve got Sibelius 7.5 running on Mojave on APFS with SSDs. We get an error/info message saying 7.5 won’t be supported on newer versions but it’s working perfectly otherwise. As long as it opening and the licences are being checked out (if you’re running a network licence server) then there shouldn’t be a problem.

I’ve no experience with that specific RAID controller, however you should be able to add extra disks and create a new RAID volume to use as a secondary data store. You could then use the existing RAID 1 to hold the 2012R2 OS and the second RAID 1 for holding your images. Its not the most ideal situation (If you were starting from scratch you’d create a RAID10 using all 4 disks) but it should get you some more capacity and should be easy enough to implement. I’d double check the manual for the RAID controller first though just to make sure it is possible. You could also purchase bigger disks, and swap 1 disk, let the array rebuild, then swap the other disk, and let it rebuild again. You should then be able to expand the volume in Windows (I have never tried this and it obviously carries more risk) Alternatively, can you map storage from your other server via iSCSI rather than a mapped drive if you think this is causing the issue?

I’m certainly no expert when it comes to SANs or VMWare, but I’d stick with RAID 10 - you’ll loose capacity, 12 x 1TB / 2 = Approx 6TB in RAID 10 vs 12 x 1TB - 1 = Approx 11TB in RAID 5, but gain read and write performance, and reliability. We’ve currently got HP 2510 switches doing SAN switching only. All other server connections are to our core switch. I don’t think there’s anything stopping you using the same switch for iSCSI and VM traffic, just use VLANS/Subnets to separate the traffic. VM Traffic could go on VLAN20 10.0.10.0/24. SAN traffic would either then go on separate switches or on a new VLAN/Subnet on the same switches. I’m guessing the SAN also has some management ports - these would go onto your management network so you can actually login to the SAN to manage it. If you’re aggregating iSCSI, don’t use LACP or Teaming but use MPIO. Try and spread out connections over the Onboard/PCI NICS rather than having all the iSCSI connections just on the PCI Card, and the VM connections just on the Onboard NICS. Have one VM Traffic connection on the Onboard NIC, and one on the PCI card, then one iSCSI on the Onboard NIC and the others on the PCI card. This way, should either the PCI card, or the Onboard controller fail you won’t completely lose connections. Same goes with connections from the SAN to the switches. SAN controller 1 port 1 to switch 1, controller 1 port 2 to switch 2, controller 2 port 1 to switch 1, controller 2 port 2 to switch 2. Again this is to remove any single point of failure. Hope thats useful, but I’m no expert on SANs or VMWare!

I’ve spent ages today trying to get SnipeIT to work under Ubuntu - had much better luck with CentOS https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/7d5f68/recommended_server_specifications_for_snipe_it_app/ Install CentOS (I chose the option with the GUI as it was easier to setup the networking and Linux isn’t my strong point) sudo yum update -y sudo yum upgrade -y Install Wget sudo yum install wget -y Download the SnipeIT.sh install script from github. sudo wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/snipe/snipe-it/master/snipeit.sh Run the install script sudo bash ./snipeit.sh Then just run through the setup. Everything else should then install itself. Seemed to work okay for me

The Edgeswitches will do Layer 3 and have a full command line interface in addition to the web management. The Edgeswitches act as individual/traditional switches (each with their own web gui) whereas the UniFi switches require the UniFi controller software or Cloudkey for setup and configuration. I think the UniFi line of switches are targeted more towards SMB and the Edgeswitches are targeted more at enterprise. Hardware is identical as far as I understand.

I’m running 2x NVS300 cards (both from ICT Direct) to give me a total of 4 VGA outputs. I think the NVS310 has dual DisplayPort outputs and the NVS300 will do either VGA or DVI depending on which DMS59 splitter you have. Works great for me but I’m not running anything that’s GPU intensive.

Thanks but the reconnect box is already unchecked for each drive.

Hi, We are having an issue with drive mappings in Windows 10. Very occasionally a member of staff will login and get no mapped drives. Logging out and back in again, or running GPUPDATE fixes the issue. It happens with different users on different PCs and there seems to be no pattern to which members of staff or which computers are affected. The same user policy is applied to all staff and is only causing an issue on Windows 10. Windows 7 computers aren't affected. All the drives in the policy are set to 'Update'. Thanks!

We currently have no fibre or PoE on this switch and no requirement for 10GB at the current time. It's all (about 35 ports) 1GB copper. There is also no requirement for L3 routing and we are only using 4 VLANS I understand that a 2530 is really an edge switch but what is the advantage of going up to a 2920 when its almost double the cost?

Hi All, We are looking at replacing our 'Core' switch (Netgear GSM7248R) primarily due to age. I say 'core' switch as we have a County Council supplied Cisco L3 switch which routes our internet connection to both admin and curriculum networks. The Netgear then has connections to all the servers, and most other cabinets in school. Any recommendations for switches would be much appreciated. I've looked at either a similar model Netgear, a HP 2530-48G or an offering from Ubiquiti. The whole site is Netgear at the moment but we are open to change, although the Netgear lifetime warranty has proved very useful on a number of older PoE switches! Thanks

Yes we have exactly the same issue and have been through lots of handles in the 2 years we’ve had the trolleys. It seems like the latest batch of handles have been revised, and have a slightly more reinforced centre section. We haven’t had any breakages of the new type so hopefully this has sorted the problem.

I really like the Synology devices. We have an RS2416 and RS816 in one school which is used for file sharing/backups of our Apple Macs, and a DS416 in another school operating as a Veeam iSCSI backup target. I also have a DS916 at home. I would recommend them all day for NAS/file sharing use.... However I would be cautious of using one as VM storage. Yes it will do it via iSCSI, but a SAN is purposely designed to do this. You’re also (unless you have two) introducing a single point of failure. I would look at Starwind/HP VSA/VSAN if you need HA. Local storage will always be significantly faster than network or iSCSI. I believe that within Hyper-V (if that’s what you are using) there are ways of replicating virtual machines across 2 nodes. It’s also reasonably simple to live migrate VMs across nodes (for maintenance etc) with no shared/network storage. There are lots of ways to do it, but (even being a massive Synology fan) I would be very cautious about storing all my VMs on one.

Hi all, Our Apple Push Certificate has expired and profile manager is no longer pushing out settings as it should do. Most of the student accounts I have just created (2 months ago) have no restrictions applied... The strange thing is that the restrictions have applied successfully to a few of the accounts (so Profile Manager is telling me) Will setting up a new certificate and importing it into the server solve the problem? I will have to use a new Apple ID as I don't have access to the account that the Mac Server was originally set up with. How do I re-enroll all the Macs after I have done this? We only have about 20 Macs, so if I need to manually visit each one thats no big problem. Is it as simple as visiting 'servername.local/mydevices' and re enrolling from there? We are still running 10.9 should that make any difference. Any comments/help would be greatly appreciated!

Hi All, I am trying to put together a solution for backing up a number of iMacs on our network. We have two rooms, one with 12 iMacs and the other with 16 iMacs. They are setup on their own network/VLAN, bound to OD and managed from a Mac Mini Server using Profile Manager. Users all have network homes that live on the internal drive of the server. The HD in each iMac is partitioned into two. A 'system' drive and a 'data' drive. The data drive is where the students do most of their work from - using Logic X/GarageBand and Sibelius. Trying to run these projects across the network doesn't work due to the massive amount bandwidth required, and they need to be run locally. The problem is that non of the students work on the 'data' drive is backed up automatically. It is simply copied/pasted onto a NAS whenever I have time to walk round to each machine. This obviously takes ages to do and we need a better/automated solution. The NAS is also used as shared storage for all Mac users and contains lots of archive data. Has anyone used TimeMachine for backing up that many machines? I was considering a large NAS device (the current one is almost full) with multiple users/quotas so each Mac would have its own quota and TM wouldn't just fill the NAS. I know the Synology devices will let me do this (I have one at home) but I don't know if I'm going to run into issues with this many machines. The two Mac suites are on opposite sides of the school and in different buildings, so I was thinking about 1 larger device (Room 1 Backups, Shares, Archive Data) and 1 smaller device (Room 2 Backups). I'd be very much open to any suggestions! Thanks

Hi all, I'm currently putting together a new network using 2 VMware hosts with shared storage. Our budget wont stretch to a SAN but if we were to use something like a Synology RS2212+ (or even a bigger model with 4 GBe ports) would that work for storing 4 or 5 virtual machines (probably more in the future) plus all the users data etc? We have around 25 desktop machines but need quite a lot of storage capacity. The other alternative is to put a RAID 1 set in each of the hosts for the VM's and have all the user data stored on the NAS via iSCSI. I assume that having the OS storage locally on the hosts gives better performance but is more difficult to backup and more difficult to migrate should there be a fault with one of the hosts. (We will be using the free version of ESXi so wont have vMotion) Having everything stored on the NAS makes it easier to backup as all the data is in one place, but you end up with a single point of failure. Some advice would be very much appreciated!

Thanks for the replies. I'll talk to the LEA about VM's and SIMS and see what would work best. Would a Dual Xeon server be overkill? We do have around 35 laptops as well which are all currently standalone, but will be putting these onto the domain and setting up remote access when I've got time. Thanks again

Hi Everyone, I'm looking into migrating our curriculum and admin network. Curriculum server is just an uprated desktop. i7 with 8GB ram, 2x 1TB SATA drives in RAID 1 (2K8R2). This serves around 20 desktop machines (AD, File, DHCP, DNS, Print, WSUS) Admin network (5 PC's) doesn't have a domain and SIMS is just run off one machine, with a shared drive setup for the other 4 computers to access files. Could anyone recommend a reasonable spec also capable of running SIMS? Thanks

Got an iPhone 5 today and tried the EarPods not really expecting a lot, but I was quite surprised. Much better than the last generation of iPod earphones. Bass is slightly exaggerated as it usually is, but for the money (or free with the iPhone 5) I was rather pleased. I've tried a number of different earphones and they've always ended up falling out. Then I gave up and got a pair of High-End AKG's but the EarPods should fair a bit better when I'm out and about.

Thanks for all the replies so far, the Server to the Switch is a 1GB link, but the Clients are only on 100MB. I thought about a thunderbolt drive, but you've still got the same problem of moving the data over the network. The best solution would probably be to copy the projects from the server onto local storage (perhaps partition the internal HD) then copy them back to the server when finished. Upgrading to a 1GB link would probably speed this up quite a bit and make it fairly useable. Thanks

Thanks for the reply, confirming what I thought. External drives would be nice and fine for the A-Level Music Tech students, but when you consider our Year 8's (All 200 of them) are now also doing some film projects in Logic...... Ill have to try and partition the internal drive, allowing the data to be copied onto that, then copied back to the server. Although that would take a while over 100mbps ethernet as well......

Hi all, hope I've posted this in the right place, currently having a bit of trouble with music technology students and extremely large file sizes of projects. We run a Server-Client based system off a Mac Mini Server, with everything stored on the server itself. This was set up over the summer as locally backing everything up was a nightmare (Ended up with around 6TB of data from less than 40 machines). The system on paper works perfectly, however, all students music recordings are stored on the server and we are getting 'Disk to Slow' error messages when trying to play back in Logic 9. The connection between the server and clients is only 100mbps, but whether upgrading this to gigabit will make any difference I don't know. I would have thought it wouldn't though. Originally the machines were all set up as standalone machines, but it ended up with students messing around with other people work, people copying their entire iTunes library off their iPod onto the macs etc.... Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated Thanks