srochford

It's for the duration of your subscription. I've just played this game (but for an MSDN subscription). Phone the contact number on the MS web site and explain that you have a Technet subscription which gives you free incidents. They probably won't know what you're talking about but will put you through to someone who can set up the contract for you. That then gives you a magic number - you then call back the number you started with and quote that number and you will eventually be able to log a call. the whole process took me about 3 days - during that time, i managed to find the answer anyway :-)

It's all fairly depressing and it shouldn't be. this is the first time in decades that a government has attempted to provide really good schools - too many are inadequate (in building terms rather than learning outcomes) and this should be an opportunity to get it right. I don't work in a school but my experience of new builds is that a huge amount depends on getting the right architects at the outset. One small example - the building we opened last year has lots of good features but some nightmares (network cabinets which are not big enough because the "design and build" process didn't design it properly - we've ended up with a cabinet full of patch panels so the switches go in a neighbouring cabinet...) By contrast, the next building has much better architects (I'll name them - Faber Maunsell) who are already asking relevant questions about networking infrastructure even before the final shape of the building is in place and with plenty of time to get it all right. If BSF has architects and planners of the latter quality then there should be nothing to worry about. If they're not then this will be just a huge waste of money.

RFC 2821 specifies that "Retries continue until the message is transmitted or the sender gives up; the give-up time generally needs to be at least 4-5 days." This means that anyone sending you email will retry for several days (so this covers things like weekend outages) You can't publish (eg) 192.168.2.10 as an MX address - no router in the world will know how to get there - but you should be able to publish the IP address of your router and then tell it that anything connecting on port 25 should forward to 192.168.2.10

Still not sure that I understand. I suspect you've actually got to sort 2 things: 1 - render a report for each possible input 2 - convert that to PDF Assuming that you can't just do something like: http://localhost/report.cgi?code=1 http://localhost/report.cgi?code=2 http://localhost/report.cgi?code=3 etc then I think you're stuck.

I think we're getting two kinds of authentication mixed up - there's the computer authenticating to get a network connection via wireless - you want this to happen before the user logs on but (as far as I know) this will happen even with a standard WEP key after the first time it's been entered. the other authentication is the computer account authenticating with active directory - this needs a network connection to be in place (kind of hard for the computer to talk to a DC without it :-))

How?? the machine has to authenticate before the user logs in - otherwise you'll get "Domain not available" messages The GPO updates for the machine should get applied before the user logs on if you have it set to wait for network at startup; the user bits of GPO can't apply until after the user has logged on (because they depend on the user!)

When you say "going round and deleting all the default profiles" that sounds like a lot of work and that (to me!) says "must be a better way" :-) Do you know that if you put a profile folder called "default user" in the netlogon share of your server then that will be the profile used by any domain user who doesn't have a profile configured (even if there is already a default profile on the local machine) If the problem is in the default profile then just make sure you get that profile right and users on new machines will pick up that profile.

Use a DNS alias In DNS admin, set up a CNAME called (say) printserver which points to the "real" name of your print server (server1 or whatever) Make the registry change described in this MS KB article It's talking about Windows 2000 but it's also needed for 2003 Change your scripts to point to \\printserver\printername etc When you get a new server, change the DNS alias, make the registry setting and that's it. Nice thing is that you can have both machines in place at the same time - clients which haven't refreshed their DNS values will just use the old one while machines starting up new will connect to the new server. Separately, do you know about Microsoft print migrator for migrating queues to a new server? It makes it very easy to take a set of queues on one server and move them (complete with drivers, permissions etc) to a new server

It would slow it down but you're probably only talking milliseconds - there's not much involved in the authentication process.

What do you want to do? Are you trying to get the equivalent of replication so that you have multiple printers serving one queue (so if one fails, the other is still there) - if so, look for details of printer pooling. If you just want to make it easy for users to find printers in the same way that DFS makes it easy to find shares then publishing the printers in AD may help. Or perhaps you're trying to do something completely different :-)

Setting up IAS (Microsoft's version of Radius) is pretty trivial - it's a while since we did it but it was wizard driven and with no difficult questions :-) You then set a group policy to say that you want the machine to use Radius and the job is done. Well worth doing :-)

and then copy the tape to something else because the tape might fail :-) Toucing lots of wood, I've never been unable to restore from disc backups (always discs in "other" machines, of course,) but I've had lots of tape failures - I now won't use them because they are inconvenient, unreliable and expensive!)

There can be a problem with the Visual Studio database explorer - when you use that to look at the tables etc it doesn't seem to co-operate nicely with your running code. Close the object browser (restart the SQL Server service if necessary) and things should work again. I've seen this before and it's a real pain - it's documented somewhere in the MS KB but I don't think they see it as a bug!

Definitely use the system state backup to backup the DC settings (and everything else) but it can be hard work to restore that to different hardware - there are MS KB articles which take you through the process. what you really, really want (!) is a second DC - that way, if one machine fails you do have a copy of the active directory data and you really, really (!!) don't want to lose that!!!!

Don't delete $hf_mig$ - it's pretty important. This MS KB article describes it (it's talking about SP2 but it's the same for all SPs)

Maybe :-) One of the problems with Windows NT was that if ever you added a component which needed the original CD you then had to reinstall the whole of the current service pack to make sure everything was up to date. Windows 2000 removed this problem by dumping the whole service pack on the C: drive. In a "corporate" environment you rarely add Windows components to the desktop machines - you update the image and push that out so it's rare that these files would be needed. Windows knows that the files are in that location because the registry values at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup tell it they're there. If you change this to point to a network share then I think that you can safely remove that folder. You probably want to have more than one folder (eg SPFiles_XPSP2, SPFiles_XPSP3 etc) on the server to cope with the different levels for each machine but it can reduce the image size. The only thing that might cause a problem is if you're trying to repair network settings and it can't get the files because they're on the network.... To be honest, though, if you're at that stage then reimaging will be easier anyway.

Have you currently got gigabit switches etc in place and you're being asked to reduce the speed to 100Mbit or have you got future plans for gigabit and you're being asked not to implement it? If you're already running gigabit I can't see any reason to stop!

Not sure I understand?? How do you look at the pages now? Do they just come up on a screen as part of an application (ie not rendered in a normal browser window)??

Do you need a domain trust if you are going to export as PST? I thought you could just export (using exmerge will make it easy) and then import to the new domain You'll lose single instance storage for existing messages if you do this - might not matter but could make your mail store grow.

that doesn't make sense?? You want to turn off scanning of network drives everywhere but turn on local on-access scanning everywhere. that way if a user accesses something on C: (eg in temp internet files) the local workstation picks it up and if they access something on a network drive then the server picks it up as a local access. You might also want to look at Virus scanning recommendations for computers that are running Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Vista for info on best practice for scanning workstations and servers.

One thing to watch out for is memory allocation - I think MS SQL defaults to using all available RAM which makes it work quickly but can mess up anything else which needs RAM ... You can configure this so that it uses no more than (say) 1Gb

I think you need to step back and ask what sort of service you're trying to provide. If the aim is to let staff keep work on a network then you need to ask "what's the proper way of doing this?" I don't save stuff on my desktop - I prefer to put it in folders neatly arranged under a top level folder (at home it's c:\work) and this goes back to DOS days when there wasn't a desktop - but there's no real problem with putting it there. As far as the user is concerned "desktop" is just a place to save stuff. It's up to IT staff to make sure that "desktop" works. For many years it's been possible to re-direct the desktop (and other key folders) so that they're stored on a network and the whole folder doesn't then get copied across the network. If you're not doing that and you're seeing problems with profiles being slow, getting corrupted etc, then maybe you should be asking yourselves why you've not read the MS guidelines for setting up profiles, desktop redirection etc There's a whole separate issue about how much data a user should be able to store but whether it's in n:\desktop, n:\work or any other folder on the network doesn't really come in to it!

Err, not quite! If your machine is configured properly then name resolution will use DNS or WINS and only fall back to broadcast if they fail. Having got the IP address for the name there is then a broadcast ARP request (if the MAC address is not already in the cache) You can watch this process with Wireshark which is really helpful to see what is using your network and how.

The thing that always amuses me about petrol prices is that they're often quote as pounds per gallon "Petrol breaks £5 a gallon barrier" and such like. The UK went metric for fuel 30 years ago and I would guess that most drivers have never paid for fuel in gallons!

I bet if you open up most "domestic" PCs you'll find they look like that - they're often put on the floor in bedrooms and they do a good job of keeping the dust down by just sucking it into the machine :-) Really, it's a tribute to the quality of the thermal design of the machine that it just keeps working anyway!