seawolf

We prefer the PCLocs iPad Sync and Charge units - iPad Sync & Charge Archives | PC LocsPC Locs We have also have a Griffin multi-dock and that works fairly well, although it can't sync AND charge at the same time. It can sync OR charge, but not simultaneously. Also, we have one Gilkon sync and charge trolley, but these aren't nearly as well designed or built as the PCLocs units and I wouldn't buy another one.

I don't believe MS intended the Hyper-V Replica feature to be used in this configuration. It would make more sense if two of the Hyper-V hosts were setup in a Primary failover cluster (primary site) with two additional Hyper-V hosts in a separate backup failover cluster (secondary site) and replication occurred between the hosts at the primary site and the hosts at the secondary site. In this situation though, you would have 4 completely independent Hyper-V hosts replicating to three other Hyper-V hosts. If a VM goes down - which replica takes over? EDIT: Also, please don't think that Hyper-V Replication is designed for HA - it is not. You will have to manually spin up the replica VM on the secondary host, and you will likely have some data loss. See Microsoft Tech Note regarding unscheduled outages and Hyper-V replicas: Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) In a BC scenario and a planned failover event of a primary VM, Hyper-V Replica will first copy any un-replicated changes to the replica VM, such that the event produces no loss of data. Once the planned failover is completed, the replica VM will then become the primary VM and carry the workload, while a reverse replication is automatically set. In a DR scenario, i.e. an unplanned outage of a primary VM, an operator will need to manually bring up the replicated VM with an expectation of some data loss, since changes of the primary VM not yet replicated to the replicated VM have now been lost along with the unplanned outage. - See more at: Hyper-V Replica Explained, Windows Server 2012 Style - Yung Chou on Hybrid Cloud - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

You can reset the Mac server by using the OSX Recovery Partition (Apple - OS X Recovery restores your Mac with a few clicks.). 1. Hold Cmd+R while booting and the system will boot into the recovery partition. 2. Choose the Disk Utility option and then reformat the drive (this won't remove the Recovery Partition). iClarified - Mac OS X - Format a Hard Drive Using Mac OS X Disk Utility 3. Choose the "Mac OSX Extended (Journaled)", which is HFS+ format, name the drive 'Macintosh HD' and click erase. 4. Close disk utility and run Reinstall OS X

You have an unusual virtualisation setup with 4 hosts all using local storage and none of them in a cluster. Your problem won't be in not having a physical DC. It will come about from the lack of HA and losing VM servers when a host goes down. Hopefully you have a good backup strategy?

Yes, it certainly could. But, the added complexity of a virtual environment makes it more likely there. The more moving parts, the more there is to break. Ah, I see what you are doing. Just make sure you don't set this server to be your primary authentication server or DNS server in any systems where you have to set primary and secondary LDAP or DNS (external systems, firewall/VPN, DHCP server, web filter, etc). Because if that server goes down (and it's more likely it could as it's not highly available) then you will encounter problems. For this same reason, you shouldn't make the physical DC that is your "safety net" in a virtualised environment your primary LDAP/DNS either. Learned that lesson the hard way,

I'm not throwing eggs at you, but what if there is an extended power outage and then a failure on startup of the host for the DC that is on local storage? That may seem somewhat unlikely, but rapid power off events are one of the most likely things to cause hardware failures. Also, wouldn't this setup require at least three hosts if one host is not part of a failover cluster? Two hosts is more common in my experience, at least in school environments.

Do you have a network diagram showing how your servers are connected and what is virtual vs. physical. This could simply be a problem with a vSwitch, but it's difficult to say without more info. What make and model of switches are the servers connected to? Do you have a network monitor of any kind? If not download "The Dude" and run it to recon your network, or install Spiceworks and have it trawl the network for a while. A network monitor of any sort would help you isolate this problem a lot better.

There are quite a few systems and services that are highly dependant on a functioning DNS and/or AD domain. This includes SAN or NAS devices. So, if your virtual environment is down due to an extended power outage or other event you may have difficulty bringing everything back online. This is not just a theoretical risk. I have experienced it personally about 5 years ago with a SAN environment that required DNS to function properly. I had to quickly install the DNS role on a physical server before the SAN was fully functional. Beyond that, you are placing all of your eggs in one basket and if your virtual environment is down for any reason, then no system or person can authenticate and DNS will not resolve including external DNS. You don't need to spend a lot on a physical DC. We just use a small Dell R210 with 4GB RAM that runs in a separate building to our main infrastructure. Cost us less than 2k. http://blog.joeware.net/2013/02/20/2675/ http://blog.joeware.net/2013/03/04/2679/

@foofigherjim You should contact Ruckus directly and state exactly what you have said on here. If you explain that they are 100% going to lose the business because of a dodgy supplier then they will allow another company to provide "preferential pricing". What you say about the Aerohive system also applies to Ruckus and you don't have to pay extra to gain additional features (it's not a "freemium" license model). We have used Ruckus for 3 years and I cannot speak highly enough about it. You might also be surprised in that you might really need less APs than you think for your site. We have 25 APs and our campus is spread over 13 bulidings across 25 acres of land. And, we have seamless coverage walking inside or outside between buildings and even on the far end of a football field.

You could leave your data outside of a VDK and back that up using BackupAssist if you wanted. If you don't have an enormous amount of data to store, then a VDK would be fine, it's just when you start getting 1TB+ of data that you would be best to keep that out of a Veeam backup file or it can take a long time to backup/restore the VM server. Veeam Backup Essentials should be fine for your environment. The licensing is for the hosts, not the backup server.

In all of my attempts to do this last year on Macs using Casper Suite, I found that AirServer ties the license to the MAC address, so there was no way around it. Trying to do it caused the app to crash every time it was launched. I confirmed with the developers of the app that the license was indeed tied to the MAC address. I ended packaging AirServer with the configuration file, but without it activated with the license. We manually install the license post install. If you happen to find a way around this, please let me know...

Have you checked the server itself to see whether it has a network connection? Try pings, trace route, nslookups, etc. check the default gateway on the server as well. Have you tried rebooting the server? Is there any shared hardware or a switch with the two servers? Have you looked at the traffic on the switch or switches they are connected to and your core switch?

Here's a little trick we use to stop that. All student iPads have a WiFi profile that is installed after they are enrolled. If the MDM profile is removed, WiFi goes bye-bye as well. So, if we have a student come to us saying "my WiFi is gone" etc. we know straight away that they have deleted their profiles and then we start investigating what they have done to it that would convince them to do something so stupid (after we've drilled into them what will happen if they do). Sometimes, it's just something innocuous and they just have decided to wipe the iPad or they got a new iPad and restored a backup, but this doesn't include the profiles and we fix those straight away. Other times, we find they've removed the profiles to install apps that are banned or to jailbreak. And then we promptly inform them that their iPad is banned from the school, or if the violation wasn't too severe we might just make them suffer with no WiFi for a month or so. Wireless Broadband is nearly useless here for students as there is almost no reception (1 bar) so banning them from WiFi leaves them with little recourse other than to suffer the consequences of their bad choices.

For Mac users who appear to be novices (apologies to SuperHI if I guessed wrong about that) I've found the maximum of an hour to reinstall the OS and start over is the better option than walking them through everything that needs to be deleted, host name rename, etc. A stray rm -r and it's all over anyway. For someone with more experience, your advice is spot on.

Another WLAN would help IF client isolation was turned the WLAN used by the students and the computers running AirServer were on the then her WLAN. Otherwise, no it wouldn't help at all.

It would seem that you have a flat network here - yes? That is what you really need to solve here. If you don't, then somehow you have bonjour traffic routing across VLANs, which is usually the opposite problem people have. I assume you have passwords set on AirServer that the teachers have to enter to connect to AirServer? If not, then turn that on. Or, just discipline the heck our of any student who does disrupt a lesson (can you say goodbye iPad).

HP Microserver might be good value. Haven't used one, but the price seems right if they have enough RAM and quality guts. I would recommend against OpenFiler though in a strong way - http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/373443-why-we-recommend-against-openfiler

Here's a FreeNAS Mini unit from ixSystems that is similar to what I built. They do ship overseas and support is good when needed (rarely needed) http://www.ixsystems.com/storage/freenas/

A MicroATX FreeNAS server with 4-5 drives for storage and a USB or small SSD drive for the OS, 16GB of RAM, a good i3 processor, and dual NIC would fit the bill nicely. I built one of these last year with 7.8TB of usable storage on 4 Enterprise SATA drives and a 16GB SSD in a very nice Liam Li case and vey high quality fans and PSU for $1,600 all up. FreeNAS is ZFS, so it's easy to expand the storage later as well. You can also get a ixsystems to build you a commercially supported model to your specs for a reasonable cost, but it will cost a little more than a DIY (but not much). Synology make a good unit, but you won't get as much performance or bang for your buck as a FreeNAS box. The FreeNAS can do NFS, iSCSI, SMB, AFP, and FTP. It also has built in UPS support and is far more flexible than any black box system.

Did you delete the GPO that you were testing before you changed it back so all of the clients would receive the change? If not - oops. Are you running Windows 7? If so, then you can use redirection to go to the Home Drive itself and you can name the redirected folder anything you want such as "Documents". We redirect Windows 7 user folders to the H: (Home) drive mapped to the same folder names as the Mac uses for its network home. This means we have one single user home with consistently named folders so it looks just entirely seamless whether on a Mac or PC. I don't have experience with SIMS and so can't comment on the error of it is some strange quirk with the software itself.

Setup the iPads on a separate VLAN and SSID, then put default filtering on the VLAN. You should still be able to track what IP address goes with which iPad at any point in time from the records on your DHCP server. Or, at least we can. That way, no prompt and annoyance to staff, and you still get the filtering and information that is required to track them if necessary.

Wipe the Mac server and re-install the OS and Server app.

The Ruckus ZD has quite a few good tools for monitoring your WiFi network, including the real time monitoring, maps, etc. There is also the very nice ZD Remote iPad app that shows things such as: - Total Client Devices - Rogue Devices - Number of clients on each WLAN (SSID) - Active devices - Device types (by OS) - Most active devices - Usage (bandwidth, average signal dB, etc.) - Most used APs (and clients We also use PRTG to provide graphing of our network, including the Ruckus APs.

First of all, you have a .local domain. That is going to cause all manner of issues with a Mac server and clients to a slightly lesser extent. If there is any way possible that you can NOT use a .local domain, you should. I would even go so far as to plan a domain rename if you have any intentions of using lots of Macs on your network. That point aside, there is a great tutorial on the configuration of Profile Manager at krypted.com - Using Profile Manager 3 In Mavericks Server | Krypted Go through this tutorial step-by-step and confirm that you have done everything correctly. There is no point in trying to troubleshoot this problem otherwise.

So, Lightspeed doesn't have the capability to filter based on the AD group? I thought that was one of the advertised abilities of Lightspeed. This works very well on our iBoss web filter. Well, if the Lightspeed can set default filtering based on subnet, then you could use separate subnets / VLANs for students and staff. That doesn't help if you have staff and students logging into the same computers though. That's where you need the AD group-based filtering.