Butuz

Wow. The constructiveness of that blog astounds me. He clearly belongs in the 80s with his BBC Master. Unfortunately for the rest of us things have moved on somewhat since then.

Have a look at this: . http://www.legitreviews.com/images/reviews/1338/corsair-hdtach.jpg http://benchmarkreviews.com/images/reviews/storage/FM-25S2S-60GBP2/Iometer_Random_4K-IOPS_30QD_Results.png ~£100 is going to net you the biggest performance gain of any upgrade ever. If your obsessed with speed get two of them in Raid 0. If your obsesed with reliability get two of them in Raid 1. Your old Raid 5 array is archaic technology that physically can't give you anywhere near the performance £100 worth of SSD can. I don't know what else to say really. Butuz

Yes you are very very lucky - I would be more than happy to live on site if that option was available, it would save me £300 a month just on petrol!!!! Butuz

Yes they have made a mistake. Combined earners shouldn't get child benefits either. If you can't afford to have children you shouldn't!! Child benefit should be used in emergency’s i.e. if one earner loses their job or the like and combined income suddenly drops under say £20k - £25k then I agree with child benefits. However if your earning over £45k singly or up to £80k combined and you are so inept that you manage your massive amount of money so badly that you somehow can't afford to live without child benefits then frankly you should not be allowed to procreate!!! That's all I am going to say on the matter because frankly I'm on the verge of going off on one and my face has gone all red !!!! Butuz

DDR2 400 is hideously expensive - it's always the same with older ram becoming more and more expensive as the factories produce less and less of it. Try buying some PC100 ram now!!! I considered the exact same plan hoping to upgrade some 100 PC's - unfortunately I wouldn’t want to go from 512 to 2gb if I was going to go to the hassle of ripping the tops off them and that would work out at about £60-70 per PC. It's simply not worth spending that much on 6 year old PC's so I'll be putting the £6000 - £7000 towards new PC's. Butuz

The air con should automatically dehumidify the air so unless you've got something seriously wrong with the building fabric, humidity shouldn't be an issue for you. As for magetic interference - I have no idea how you would check for that, I would assume it would be a specialised job, and therefore very expensive to find out. Hmm the less I say about Hitatchi the better. Hitatchi = IBM. When I was a wee boy we used to refer to IBM Deskstar hard drives as IBM Deathstars because it seemed as if every one ever made failed within a year. I had 2 in RAID 0 at that time. Big mistake. Spent more time reinstalling windows than actually doing anything productive :/ Butuz

Here - Axel: AX3000 Models 80 or send a private message to the Axel chap who posted above you. Cheers Butuz

Assuming you can rule out power (do you have sufficient UPS's) and heat (do you have decent air con) isues you may be looking at something far more strange such as humidity (this should be solved by air con) or even worse some kind of magetic interference?? Also, what make and model of hard drives do you use??? The sheer qty of hard drive faliures is definatly cause for concern. I can count the number of server HDD faliures we've had here over the last 8 years on one hand *touches wood*, and I have normal hands by the way not freakish hands. Butuz

The rest of the PC looks fine apart from your raid array. For the boot drive go with a single 60gb solid state drive @ around £100 and then use the raid 5 array just for data. Just that will give a massive speed boost in windows. Butuz

Agree SSD's rock so hard as long as you get the 200+mb/s read write versions. I have been looking into doing something similar in our ICT suites of workstations - unfortunatly with PC400 DDR ram so expensive at the moment I am really not convinced that spending £150+ per PC plus my own time upgrading them on 5 year old PC's that were originally only £300 and have no warranty, is really a good idea.... Eager to be convinced otherwise!! Also - your almost garunteed to get an even better performance increase on laptops as most older laptop HDD's are only 4200/5400rpm (and thus rubbish). PC's with 7200 HDD's should see slightly less of an increase. Have a small amount of spare cash so will order a cople of SSD's and 2GB sticks and do some testing. Butuz

James if your thin client testing, try an Axel M80 - much more powerful and easy to manage than the HP ones. I've got 100 HP thin clients here and I wish I didn't!!! Butuz

Liberum - very basic and easy to use and set up. A good first introduction to a helpdesk. Only reason I am looking to move away from Liberium is I want an integrated helpdesk/knowledgebase/inventory. Butuz

They had to get our LEA to do mine. £3k for a few bits of timber a few plaster boards a bag of nails and a couple of days of cutting and hammering. And people wonder where all the money actually goes in schools. Good luck building your own, I hope your head realises the thousands you save your school by DIY'ing!!! Butuz

The only quiet periods I have is when I am asleep! And then I usually dream strange and terrible dreams. Since they got rid of my techie I have zero time for any kind of fiddling / testing / researching Butuz

Hello Gareth. How are things going for you??? Butuz

If your loading a 42u rack full of new servers you'll be needing a 32 amp supply. Half full you could just about get away with 16 amp depending on the servers. Your question is a bit confusing. Watts = Amps x Volts. So amps = Watts / Volts. You should be able to work out your amps. Butuz

Currently using Liberum but looking to move to something more fully functional and polished. I like the look of kayako and have used it as and end user as one of my suppliers uses SupportSuite. Will investigate educational pricing!!! Butuz

~1050 students ~100 staff 300 x Desktops 100 x Thin Clients 35 x laptops 50 x Printers 50 x IWB's / Projectors 5 x Servers (VMWare) 2 x SANs SIMS and Admin Systems Reprographics Systems Web Systems Catering Systems Library Systems Just little old me as Network Manager! Not good, but it happened! Butuz

Eh oh. No Call of Duty for you tonight methinks!! Butuz

Yep be patient with it 1% after 5 mins sounds normal to me! Make sure you don't get hasty/impatient and start ripping in and out different drives or you will be in trouble! Using the raid bios console will be best as its a good idea and much faster not to have the server being used whilst the array rebuilds. Butuz

Laura I believe you have more than one issue here, as regardless of the condition of the users and the H: drive, you should be able to drill down into the workstations / resources / printers / config settings areas. Is it just the Workstations part that is empty or all of the above? When you say you recovered the H: drive do you mean you restored from backup back onto the domain controllers physical hard drive H, or do you mean you restored the backup onto your SAN hard drive H? It might be an idea to run a users health check on that domain controller by going to Users > right clicking on the DC and running health check. Butuz

Hmm!!!! I was wrong!!! That looks a nice set up!!! You must just be unlucky. How are you finding the Q Acoustics??? Butuz

Not my job mister!!!! Butuz

On CC3 you can only store user home directories on the CC3 domain controllers. Basically they have to appear under the H:\ drive on est-sr-001 or the like. As Ash says you have to present the SAN storage as actual drive letters on your CC3 domain controllers (rather than just editing the active directory home directory path to point to your SAN). So the home directory should always be \\est-sr-001 rather than \\san-name. I don't know if your apple server actually supports this method so can't really help there. Butuz

Can you actually fly a R/C helicopter? It's more difficult than it looks - in fact it is more difficult than flying a real one because you have to deal with orientation, the fact that you are not inside the cockpit. If you can't fly - its gonna be a great way of trashing your camera equipment Butuz