seawolf

Wait. Your screen name is unixman_again, but the pinnacle of IT progress for you was Windows 3.0? Somewhat ironic.

Yes, use Veeam over Symantec, that is a definite. As for your plan to rotate multiple USB drives, that isn't going to be so easy. There's no problem with rotating two 4TB drives for your full backups on the weekends as long as you configure two separate jobs for each disk and schedule them as fortnightly jobs. Using multiple disks for your daily backups isn't going to work so well I don't believe, and you would be better off buying a 2 or 4 bay DAS RAID unit (USB3, eSATA) rather than multiple drives. The weekly backups will be taken off-site I'm assuming and having one large 8-12TB pool for your daily backups will make managing your backup jobs and storage much simpler.

FOG was recently updated, but we haven't tested or deployed the new version yet so you made me wonder about the updates capability. Based on what I see on the FOG Wiki, there is still nothing related to updates (other than updating of the FOG agent), so must have been some other product you were thinking of. We use the "Green FOG Service" to shutdown all computers at 8pm. We don't turn them off until then to provide time for all updates to apply and also in case we need to remote into any systems after school ends to do any work. If they all shut down at 3:20pm then we would often have to go around turning things on. All of our computers turn back on at 8am so any updates applied at startup will be completed before students ever arrive at school. We don't comment on every GPO that we create, but for those where we think anyone might question why something is configured in a certain way in the future (or we might forget ourselves), we do add them in. I could probably pull out some information on our GPOs with the comments, but we're pretty busy right atm so it might take me a some time to get this to you.

Sure the house isn't just lifting a leg to take a whizz?

No, war is a real possible result of this. It could either become just a wider regional conflict or draw in many other nations. At the end of WW2, everyone believed war had come to an end because of the Atom bomb. And, how many wars have their been since 1945? Nuclear weapons won't stop it.

@san_narula - I recommend using a Ruckus WiFi system as it is very good value, easy to configure, and manage, has great performance, and good BYOD features. For BYOD though, I find that the capabilities of your Web Filter are much more important than those of the WiFi system. Also, I would recommend that you run some new CAT6a FTP (foiled twisted pair) to your WiFi APs rather than using existing CAT5 cabling. Otherwise, the total throughput of each AP will be limited at 100Mb and then that is going to be split to multiple clients. I would also recommend bringing all of your APs back to a single CAT6 patch panel as that will make it easier to manage/identify your points and add additional ones later (and your current patch panels are probably CAT5 as well, which won't work). I recommend FTP as it is easier to run than standard CAT6 and is also shielded eliminating crosstalk and interference.

FOG is a fantastic and very capable tool, but it isn't going to assist you with your scheduled Windows updates unless your intention is to use if for regular re-imaging in places of updates? WSUS has quite a bit of flexibility and you can set updates to occur automatically at scheduled times. We have ours set to automatically download new (approved) updates and apply them at 4pm every day, after all classes have finished. The computers will reboot as necessary to apply the updates. This eliminates the problems that you are having with updates applying during the day or "building up" over time for the computers that are rarely used. It sounds like you don't have your GPO settings configured correctly to accommodate this. I've attached a couple of screenshots showing our WSUS configurations for our PC Labs.

You should be just fine then with the Dot Hill. Even a lower end SAN should handle that load really well, especially if you don't have plans to run a VM environment on it. Just be sure to configure it as RAID6 or even better RAID 10 if you have ample capacity on it (never RAID5). RAID10 will give you maximum redundancy and performance, but RAID6 is a decent second choice.

I would have thought 450 machines would push your backend storage a bit harder than that, but I suppose it depends on how they are using the server storage. Do you use file redirection extensively, or just mostly network shares? And, are you running VMs on that storage or is it just the clients? You stated you had 8 physical servers so I wasn't sure. If you are moving to virtual (and not already) a bit more grunt will be needed, which hopefully your new SAN will give you. We are using a Sun (Oracle) 7320 with 96GB of ARC and a DEP-24P disk tray loaded with 20 x 900GB 10k SAS2 drives and 2 x 73GB Zues IOPS write caches. We have two bays spare for additional write caches or 512GB L2ARC SSDs. A 7320 with this configuration normally went for around 55k, but as it was end of FY and Oracle sales reps basically get to keep every bit of profit on anything they sell as commission in the last month of the FY - we got it for just over half price. I was originally planning to get a 7120 loaded up, but the final quote for the 7320 came in only 1k higher. Is nice, very nice. I don't know if we'll be able to get a deal like that again on its replacement, but with the advances being made in storage we should be able to buy a replacement with at least equal performance for the same or less in 4 years time. The Nimble SANs can also produce this sort of performance in the right specs.

My mistake. There must be a small number of users on the system then. Our median load is about 600 IOPS during the day, but it can spike to several thousand IOPS at times. The image below shows an average of 12,366 IOPS for ISCSI with peak of 50,000 - but this was under heavy load when a very large amount of reads and writes were occurring including migration of several VMs simultaneously.

Is this on the Dot Hill SAN? What disks does it use, how many, and what RAID level. That kind of performance seems pretty woeful for a SAN.

Printopia Pro configured with wide area Bonjour. Printopia also works well on smaller networks. XPrintServer is another option for printing. For saving work to a file server, there is WebDAV, or the better solutions FOLDR, or Acronis Access.

Yes, that's exactly what I said...to someone who just wants to see what they want to see. Anyway, have a nice day and enjoy your inner dialogue.

Ah, I see YOUR angle now. Conspiracy Theorist. Understood. Carry on.

IT Security Expert Blog: GCHQ Privacy Disregard Touches the Optic Nerve https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140513/08361127219/privacy-rights-group-files-legal-challenge-to-gchqs-extensive-hacking-activities.shtml GCHQ's spy malware operation faces legal challenge | UK news | theguardian.com Privacy Watch: GCHQ Resorts to DDOS Attacks, New Smears Against Snowden, Greenwald to Get Journalism Award | Techrights Rights body wants to investigate abuses involving MI5 and MI6 MI6, torture, secrecy and dirty words | Blogs | Amnesty International UK http://www.amazon.co.uk/Unpeople-Britains-Secret-Rights-Abuses/dp/0099469723 allAfrica.com: Ethiopia: UK Aid Should Respect Rights - Ruling Permits Review of Development Agency's Compliance (Page 1 of 2) ...I think I'll leave it at that. 'nuff said.

ermmm...if you think other countries aren't doing exactly the same thing, think again. They might be better at hiding it or haven't had an Edward Snowden pop their head up yet, but they are or would do it if they could. In the immortal words of Ronald Reagan, and probably the most sane thing he ever said

You might think so, but no. At idle, the Mac Pro draws 43W and the fan generates a barely audible 12dB noise. At full power, it only draws 238W in its most powerful configuration. So, it is both quiet and power efficient. Cheap? Definitely not.

...and Steve Jobs just rolled over in his grave It will either spell the beginning of the end for Apple or be the beginning of a new dominant player in the Enterprise market. Or, it could just be much ado about nothing and fizzle in a twinkling like so many other IBM ventures.

Was it the fully loaded FreeNAS Mini at $1,895 or the Mac Pro with Thunderbolt RAID array that was considered a fortune? I'd love to have the latter myself, but then I also need a new car and its one or the other if you know what I mean.

I would have it serviced by and authorised APC rep. You don't want an UPS catching on fire or sending a surge through equipment.

So, @laugbr80 do you normally get "quite angry" whenever someone asks a simple and non-leading question? There was no judgement in the question as there could be situations where someone might want to re-image computers on a regular basis, and there might also be cases where regular re-imaging is a hammer looking for a nail. You provided no information other than that you had 6 iMacs on wireless and no reason given for wanting/needing to re-image them. I was asking for clarification because we have used Casper Suite for a long time and might be able to help if I understood the use case. It might also be a circumstance where something like Deep Freeze or another less brute force solution might be more suitable. My bad for attempting to help you. I'll make sure I don't offer again...

The new Mac Pro connected to a Thunderbolt RAID array. Otherwise, you might speak to Kevin Le at iXsystems about getting a FreeNAS Mini as it supports 32GB RAM and 4 drives (OS is on a USB or SSD and doesn't take up one of the bays) or having a custom Microserver built if the specs on the stock model don't meet your requirements. They will build anything to meet your requirements and the costs are pretty reasonable. I've had one built by them and the are great to work with and will ship and warranty/support their gear overseas. Shipping wasn't much either. It will come with FreeNAS installed out of the box, but you would be able to install any version of Linux or Windows onto one of these units. p.s. pricing is only $995 + shipping for the barebones FreeNAS Mini without drives or $1,895 for 4 x 4TB (Enterprise) drives. Like I said, quite reasonable.

BES is about the only thing I've seen that can do all that - but that only works for Blackberry's. For silently installing apps, pulling reports on app usage, and tracking and wiping devices, just about any of the MDM systems out there for iOS and Android can do those. You might want to look at the iBoss MobilEther MDM solution, which is quite good. Absolute Manage also does MDM for a wide variety of devices, including iOS, Android, Windows, and Blackberry.

HP 1810s are a good bet for fanless switches. They are relatively inexpensive models though and might not be suited to more critical applications or where you need layer 3 capabilities.

The US-EU Safe Harbour act always was for all intents and purposes smoke and mirrors. The idea is difficult in theory and completely unworkable in practice. In a global economy with data flowing all around the world and moving across various routers, switches, servers, databases, backups, etc. it is impossible to provide surety that companies are meeting the requirements and in actual practice it is almost certain NONE of them were. The reason it was put in place is that EU businesses and governments would be severely hindered, probably crippled if they had to implement the EU Data Protection standards in all business dealings. The EU would become a closed market having isolated itself from the rest of the world due to the onerous and unrealistic data protection laws. The EU knows this, which is why the smoke and mirrors were put in place "look away, there is no man behind the curtain...". I believe that the US, or any country for that matter, should have the right to demand data be provided on a resident or citizen of that country (US in this case) under court order - regardless of where that data is stored. Countries should not have the right; however, to demand access to the data of other countries citizens and residents even by court order without approval by the other countries government or courts. Exceptions to that might be "rogue" nations such as North Korea, Syria, etc. where agreement would never be given by said country and the information is legitimately needed for national security reasons (which should still come through a court subpoena). It shouldn't be open slather though, and that's where the balance needs to come in. The EU data protection laws are unworkable though for any foreign company (and probably many EU companies if they were honest about it), so the EU realistically has to make a choice to either become digital hermits in the world or to be a little more realistic about what is actually possible and workable.