Gardinho

I passed my ITIL Foundation v3 a couple of weeks ago. To be honest, I didn't really enjoy the book, but I'm glad I did it. I'm not sure I will be doing any further ITIL qualifications for the time being. The foundation exam is pretty easy to accomplish, providing you put a few weeks of revision in. A lot of jobs I have seen have stated that an 'Understanding of the ITIL Framework is desirable'. This is what encouraged me to do it. Holding the entry level cert does verify and meet that requirement, even if you are by no means an expert in this practise. I also wanted to do something different to supplement my Microsoft certs.

I have 16 points, cabled back to my office, plus whatever devices are in there plugs straight in. It sounds like overkill, but when you start counting the devices in a typical IT nerd's house they soon add up. Living room - 8 points (TV, Onkyo AMP, Sky box, Mac Mini for XBMC, Router (Main phone point is down there), PS3 plus a couple spare. Spare bedrooms have 2 in each (Not terminated yet as we don't use the 2 spare bedrooms). Ours has 3 (TV, Sky box and WD HDTV Live) Office - 2 NAS drives (one has 2 NICs), Desktop. The pic is a little old, so some cables aren't in there. Whatever you think you need in there, double it. It's so much easier to do it all now then at a later date. If you don't have a dedicated cupboard for your switch, make sure you buy a fan-less one. They're completely silent. I was tempted by Cat6, but opted for Cat5e in the end. I can't see me needing more than GB throughput, plus it was way cheaper and easier to run/terminate. You'd need a pretty decent switch and router to get the full benefits of Cat6, which would be further expense. 1080p 3D HD movies with full DTS MA audio only needing way less than 100mb LAN bandwidth to run faultlessly, and that's the most intensive stuff I'll be doing. With that in mind, Cat5e at 1gb was a no brainer. I know mine is a little ridiculous, but to be honest it was just a really nice project for a true IT geek. I really enjoy having it, and use it way more than I thought I would. My mate is an electrician who put loads of new electric points throughout the house too. Shame about the shoddy ADSL2 broadband! Good luck. I'm almost jealous that it's not me doing it again.

I bet being an expert in IT, carpentry and landscape design has resulted in a lot of people asking you for 'favours' Neph?? Oh, and I have recently had my house cabled. 18 points all back to my office. Just put a 16TB Synology DS414 in too. Loving it for transfer speeds over the LAN! I must say I'm still loving IT, even after 13 years in the field. I have installed a great media centre are home, with decent Onkyo amp that passes HD Audio. Whenever I feel myself getting a bit stale, I just look at one of the other areas in IT. It's so broad that there is always something new to learn.

Is that the Synology DS414? I have one of those for my own media and data. Absolutely love it! Once I'd put 4 X 4TB drives in it was quite expensive though!

I would still be very wary about putting that many services on a 35MBps internet line. How many users are you talking @speckytechy? One thing to note is that VoIP is a completely different animal in terms of configuration and maintenance. I think it's not a job to undertake on your own. If you run into any problems on your network, you will not be able to make internal or external calls. Are you protected from loops etc with STP? Network, CCTV and Voip a lot of responsibility for a small IT Dept. I'd be tempted to outsource some of it.

Is it not worth it for security purposes too?

You will need a decent layer 3 switch and configure routing tables and VLANs. I would have separate VLANs for voice, cctv, wifi and data. EG VLAN1 - Data VLAN2 - Voice VLAN3 - CCTV VLAN4 - WiFi You would need to tag the ports on the switches that the APs are physically connected to with the Wireless VLAN - VLAN4. Configure the Ruckus Controller to dish out addresses on VLAN4. You would also need to tag the other physical ports for your cctv and phones. Will the cameras, phone handsets and WiFi all be powered with POE switches? You will have to have logical cabling and detailed documentation of your network to get this project to work. My experience of VoIP is that you'd need a network device that would be able to traffic shape, or your phone system will fall over the minute someone tries to download a large file (think 5GB iso). To be honest, what you're trying to achieve is doable but you need to have the right kit and relevant experience to be able to implement it. You will be saturating the Internet connection, and I'd be very wary of putting that much dependance on the network. If you figure out a better way to do it I'd love to hear about it. Very interesting project!

Have you had a look at the new Intel NUC? My mates just bought one for home and it's very nice. Only half the price of a mac mini. Mini PC - Intel® NUC That said, I have a mac mini running my media centre and I am pretty happy with it. Mine is a 2011 model. When I eventually replace it I'll be getting an NUC.

We have one flat domain for all users. 3 DCs that replicate. IMO having 2 separate domains would be difficult to troubleshoot with no clear benefits. You can just configure what type of profile they have in AD anyway so this can easily be done in one domain.

We have 4 Buffalos here too. Dreadful in comparison to the QNAP/Synology. Performance is the biggest issue. They weren't over reliable either as 2 died in their warranty period. Plus the buffalos we have don't support iscsi (including the 4 bay model). The buffalos here are used sparingly by ourselves and would never consider putting them into production.

You're looking at the best two NAS brands in my opinion. Not much difference between the 2, but my experience has been: QNAPs have better hardware/build quality. Synologys have better all round software and a much nicer OS. Depending on which model you're looking at Synology's tend to be compatible with more drives. The other benefit with Synology is the Hybrid RAID technology. For me it would come down to cost (including drives), as you're splitting hairs with quality. Either would be a good choice. I have 2 QNAPs at work - TS-412u and TS419u. Both have 4 x 3TB drives in. I have a Synology DS414 at home with 4 x 4TB drives in.

We looked at this but ruled it out as it doesn't accommodate BYOD/iPads/Phones.

Hi guys, We're looking for some Internet monitoring software so that we can trace unacceptable use. Something like the Computer Usage Monitoring tool as part of the Impero package/Smoothwall/Lightspeed. The only problem is, we don't need any of the other elements of the software. We don't really want to be paying for features that we won't be using. Does anyone have any guidance on this? I'd rather not contact the likes of Impero directly for advise as I CBA getting hounded by aggressive salesmen for years on end! Many thanks,

I'm a keen golfer. My current handicap is 2. I was at Ross-on-Wye last season, but have since joined Lilley brook in Cheltenham after moving house. I maintained +1 for about 10 years during my youth, but time, beer and women put pay to that. @kennysarmy is also a golf nut local to me here.

Yes we use Veeam v6.1. We have direct SAN access too, backing up 20 odd VMs from 3 ESXi hosts. I'd love to add a 4th host to our VMWare infrastructure but the licence pricing for this is complicated. I haven't yet got my head around it. To be honest I'm not too concerned about the write speeds as we are well within the allotted time for completing backups. I think our Veeam processes at about 200MB so I can't complain.

This is true. We have FC connection to our backup server. A full backup (not differential) on a weekend normally takes us about 12 hours for 3TB. The bottleneck for us is the USB3 dual external drive. This works for us but quicker speeds would be nice at some stage.

What hardware do you backup to? 6 hours is good!

Again, all excellent points raised. Thanks for your input. I would really be looking to choose the modules that best match the job role here (IT Manager). There seems to be a lot to choose from. There isn't anything too specific I'm looking at. Nephilim's suggested modules look like a good starting point (apart from the German - my grasp of foreign languages is rather poor!). I'm going to put something together tomorrow and let the HT have a look at it. Will keep you all posted. Likewise would be nice if other geeks obtaining a degree could post an update on here every now and then to see how everyone's doing. Many thanks,

OK. Thanks for your advise. Impressed you're going to fund it yourself. The fees are huge! How are you going to juggle it with family time\social life etc? Most people I have spoken to have taken about 6 years to complete. That doesn't worry me though, I'd only be 35 by then so still would have 30+ years of work!

That sounds plausible, but silly. What would happen if I chose that module? Surely I wouldn't be expected to sit those exams again...

I do have the full amount as part of my Enterprise Administrator cert. The only exams in that module are 70-640 (AD) and 70-642 (Network Config)?

I've just had an email from the OU: "I am sorry to say we cannot approve credit transfer in respect of Microsoft training courses, as they are not listed on our website as being assess or eligible." Strange, as I thought they are assessed under TM128? Those are some of the exams I have.

Thanks for the comprehensive post nephilim.

I have considered that. I am very fortunate with my job. The pay is good, government pension, good team and work for good management. It would have to be something special for me to leave. Unfortunately, the jobs that have tempted me have all required a degree. Like you though, if I were employing I would take professional certs + experience over a degree any day.

Interesting to see the different course. Thanks @fs171