Butuz

Here is what the maths version looks like on moodle. I agree it's not pretty. But at the moment I am just happy that it works!!!

Oh!! I thought the ESXI embedded from the likes of Dell etc was actually embedded on an EEPROM (i.e repliable) rather than a USB / SD drive? I agree the USB / SD drive is not a good idea as they are far from reliable. Butuz

Had a robin stuck in the stair well in ICT dept. It didnt want to go back out and was scaring the pupils so had to catch it and release it. Ninja reflexes and soft hands helped, as it semed quite comfy when I released it outside it flew a meter away and just stood there looking at me!! Strange!!! Also had a squirrel stuck in one of the ICT rooms but didnt try and catch that as they can bite your finger off, so just eventually shoed it down the fire exit!! Nowt like mixing a bit of naturewatch into every day school life!!!! You don't get that kinda interesting daily variation in industry!!! Butuz

Theoretically embedded is the way forward as you would not need any local storage in each ESXi server, thus saving on purchase cost and electricity costs. I have not used the embedded version though, only used the install version myself. Butuz

Yep I use Triple Parity with 2 hot spares on the Suns but this DC is a few years old now and didnt support Raid 6 when I set it up. Still... it's nice to see that old school RAID levels still actually safeguard data though!! Butuz

Aah so you were trying to use a 10/100 switch? Wouldnt suprise me if the SAN only actually supports 1Gbit and not 100Mbit. Butuz

I'd suggest the problem may well be a config setting on the actual SAN rather than the switch (as the two servers can presumably talk to eachother via the switch). Can you get into the SAN web interface and make sure the SAN LAN card's are re-set to auto negotiate etc? Butuz

Thanks for all your prayers. It took 6 hours but the array rebuilt itself and is now showing as consistant!!!! I am very impressed that the array successfully rebuilt whilst the server was actually being used!!! My mind boggles as to how that is actually possible but clearly it is! That server as well as being a DC hosts shared drives, all staff accounts and years 7 - 11 accounts so it gets quite busy!!! It's still beeping at me though - I think I will shut it down tonight and remove the broken hard drive. The dud drive is not even showing in the RAID manager any more I think it must be totally deadorized!! There's a lesson to anyone who does not believe in the virtues of Raid 5 & a Hot Spare!!!! No one else in the school apart from SMT has any idea of the 6 hours worth of pallava my server (and I) have been through!!! Now thats uptime!!! Cheers Andrew

FANTASTIC!!!!!! Butuz

Hooray for Monday!!! Come in this morning to hear a loud beeping sound in the server room. :ear: One of the drives in one of my DCs has failed Have a spare ready to go so the array is now rebuilding. Wish me luck!! Please all pray for my soul (and a consistant array!!!). Butuz

Now that's what I call thinking out side of the box!!!! Fantastic idea!! Hmm we've got a vets next door - I wonder if they have an incinerator??? Butuz

What websites were those 4 kids on? Cheers Butuz

Yeh I run my terminal servers virtualised on ESXi and allocate 4 3.06ghz vCPUs to each. Can hit 100% on occasion so I wouldnt fancy running 30 clients on 2 x vCPU. In the process of setting up new TS VM's to try and optimise things a bit and also splitting it up more so that there are only 16-17 clients per TS rather than the @32-36 as it is currently. Should give more scope for running flash animations with whole classes because at the moment this can max out the server. Butuz

Some flash sites are epically badly written. It does sound like your server may not have enough CPU cores available. As kmount asks - spec? Butuz

Cant get more educational discount than linescanner can get!! What a man! Mind you it does look like Oracle are a fair bit tighter to Edu than Sun were? Butuz

She gets paid £175k a year for reportedly screwing up pretty much every aspect of her job. Outstanding!!! Butuz

Hi 3s-gtech The reason your CPU use is never above 25% is because SQL Express edition only uses one CPU core - thus SIMS will never be able to use more than 25% cpu usage in task manager, and in fact 25% usage means SIMS is flat out and gagging for more CPUs. It also has a 1GB RAM limit so upgrading your ram from 4 to 8GB will make no difference. The best upgrade you could make would be to move from SQL Express to the Standard version thus quadrupling the amount of CPU power and memory available for SIMS to use. That should give SIMS performance a good kick up the bum even though you are already happy. Butuz

Aha I managed to figure out the problem with our Moodle and our Oxbox. It was the last thing I tried - it is our theme!!!! If I change our moodle back to any of the standard moodle themes our Oxbox displays properly and opens and previews all resources. If I change it back to my school theme it breaks the Oxbox as above. I am in the process of downloading some third party themes to see if I can replicate this behaviour, or if it is simply my theme that is totally non SCORM compliant. So give that a try - try changing your theme. Butuz

Realistically all you need is 2 x Quad Core CPUs, 16GB of RAM (so you can fit your entire SIMS DB in RAM) and 4 x 10/15,000RPM SAS drives in RAID 10. Run Win2008 64 bit. That should be fine. Butuz

CDs/DVDs will fail at the slightest touch??? What CDs/DVDs have you been using? Personlly I think CDs/DVDs are very robust - you can scratch the heck out of them generally and they will still work. Butuz

IMHO forget fiber channel. You already have a 10gbit capable core switch (fair play I am jealous) so it would be much more cost effective and barely slower for you to use 10Gbit connectivity straight from the core into the san be it via Fibre or Cat6. Just put the storage server and data on a seperate VLAN. I assume you have 10Gbit connections to your servers too? Just tag on the SAN vlan using existing 10Gbit. Job done super fast. Use a mixture of 1) SSD's for database data 2) 10/15k RPM SAS for general file storage and 3) 7200RPM SAS/SATA for largescale video files / backups etc. Butuz

I got rid of the kettle from my office as i just drank and drank and drank tea and coffee. Not good for you!! I now have to walk all the way to the main office and thus only fit in about 3 - 5 cups a day mixed between tea and coffee. Much better!! Butuz

http://www.manufacturer.com/cimages/product/www.alibaba.com/0320/u/11321041_Cable_Tie.jpg Butuz

Hi Dan. Having the exact same problem here with GCSE maths for OCR OXBOX. Identical to how you describe. We are running on LEA moodle 1.9 and I have tried both the 1.2 and 2004 versions with no success. Oxford University Press have not been particularly helpful, saying that basically they can't test it or support it on individual VLE's, their line is that they made the SCORM package successfully and it is up to us to get it working on whatever VLE we use. Nice. Both me and the LEA are stumped and have been since Sept. When I looked at it in Sept I could not find anyone else in the entire world who was using these packages! It is nice to finally meet someone who is using an OxBox!!! I would like to shake your hand sir because now I do not feel alone any more!!!! This post has been no help whatsoever to you but it made me feel better anyway!!! Butuz

I'd focus my attention of the USB hard drive as the likely culprit. Also does your motherboard deffo support USB 2? If it's as old as it sounds, it may be running USB1... Can you do a back up to a local hard drive to test this theory? Butuz