seawolf

It sounds very much like your clients are not Mavericks compatible. Got the same result when I tried to install 10.8 on a 2008 Mac Pro that wasn't on the compatibility list, thought I would have a go at it anyway. Net booted and installed, but same screen as you've got was the result.

I don't know if your .local domain is part of this problem, but I've personally seem that cause a load of other problems with Macs. So much so, now I wouldn't touch a .local domain with a 10 foot pole when it comes to Macs. Been there, done that. Never again. That said, you don't have the Macs set to prefer the domain controller that died do you? That is an option and could certainly cause problems. Otherwise, I have never seen Macs have a problem with a missing AD server. Of course, your DNS may be completely stuffed and that could be causing it as well. I strongly suggest diving into the console after logon failures (with a local user) and searching for the username that failed to logon. You should learn quite a lot about the cause of the problem that way. And of course, check DNS resolution to your servers.

How many clients do you have to upgrade?

Awesome!

So, how is the Mac deployment going with DeployStudio?

That's apparently the new Chromebook "Tablet Computer" that looks exactly like an iPad...

Umm......at what point in time did a Chromebook laptop become known as a "tablet computer"? Before I clicked on the link, I thought perhaps there was a new Chrome tablet out. Moving on - I think if a school is strongly willing to commit to heavy use of Google Drive, Cloud Print, and accepts the limitations of Chromebooks (there are many) then they can be a low-cost and reasonably effective way to put computers in the hands of a lot of students. They aren't for everyone or every school though. We are currently making limited use of them.

I would not recommend either of these for filtering. We had mega problems with Sophos in the past and I still hear bad things about these units even today. As for Watchguard, they make a great firewall, but for filtering - not so much. That is a tall order to have a really good web filter that is commercially supported for that low of an ongoing costs. My recommendation for web filtering for the past three years has always been the iBoss. For the number of users that you have, you could purchase an iBoss web filter for under 2k (USD) so that easily meets the upfront cost requirement. However, the ongoing costs are around 3k (USD) for 600 users (they charge based on concurrent users, not devices). The prices are in USD because there isn't an iBoss reseller here in Australia so I have just purchase and licensed it through their HQ in San Diego. Our unit (iBoss 3660) only cost $1,850 USD three years ago. I would wager that you will not find a better solution than the iBoss, at any price. Otherwise, if you really have a tight budget, you might consider building your own web filter box on a SuperMicro chassis (or just using a VM) running DansGuardian. It will cost you more time and won't be as good as the iBoss, but if you have more time than money it's an option. I have very little spare time for such things, so the $3,500 I spend each year on the iBoss subscription is a no brainer.

If you still have a problem when using this, then the problem lies with the OD setup most likely.

So, you are running some pretty old Macs (pre-2008) it sounds like? If so, then yes you are a bit limited there. I wouldn't recommend using disk utility. I haven't tried that in so long I don't know if it would still work (maybe it does with 10.6). Just follow the documentation on the Wiki pretty much to the letter and you will be fine - http://www.deploystudio.com/Doc/Doc.html DeployStudio is very easy to get up and running. Just get your head around workflows and you will be able to automate a great deal. Besides monolithic images you can push out packages as well and make them available to end users in a self service fashion. If you dual-boot it can handle that as well, but I would recommend also setting up a FOG server and sysprepping the Windows image using the fog client to name and bind the windows partition after the DeployStudio image completes.

I recommend PRTG for monitoring bandwidth usage (and everything else) on your network. The "Top 10" reports will show you if you have a network issue. But, as suggested in a previous comment, I would hedge a bet that it's not a network issue at all, but similar to a teacher saying "the internet is down" when in fact it is a single website that is down...

As suggested by Jwzg, DeployStudio is a good solution for you. It is easy to deploy and configure using the instructions from the Wiki. It is also very reliable and fast for deploying monolithic images. A couple of questions though: 1. Why are you deploying 10.6 for clients? Is there a particular compatibility issue you're concerned with? 2. Are you taking an image of a computer that has already been bound to OD? The best way to use DeployStudio is to build a computer exactly as you want it configured, but don't bind it and name it something generic (e.g. z_10.68_MediaLab). Then use the computer naming and binding script features in DeployStudio at post install time in your workflow. That's all you need to do.

Yeah, the G8s should be a good bet. Make sure you don't skimp on the CPUs as these can't be upgraded cheaply or easily later (same with the RAID HBA), and I recommend at least 48GB on a VM host these days. RAM can be upgraded pretty easy in the future if you can't afford a load of it right now, but make sure you don't fill up the slots with a bunch of small RAM sticks trying to save money or it causes problems later when you do want to upgrade.

You can do virtualization fairly inexpensively, but be careful about going too cheap or your performance and reliability will actually end up being poorer than for a traditional physical environment (as well as being far more complex). I would suggest you spend your money on two well spec'd hosts that are on the HCL of your chosen virtualization solution, and a good backup solution if you are going to virtualized on the "cheap". Use local storage on your hosts rather than a NAS/SAN, unless you have the dough to build something like a SAM-SD (http://sam-sd.john-refactored.com/doku.php), and have a decent understanding of SANs. FreeNAS is perfectly suitable (we use it here) and I would definitely recommend it for your backup storage combined with Veeam and/or BackupAssist depending on if you use ESXi or Hyper-V. SuperMicro hardware (DIY) is a good way to keep your costs down for backup storage, but just be sure to use enterprise (RAID quality) drives such as the WD SE or RE lines with any RAID storage or you may have issues.

Only the HTTP sensors can be configured with the proxy settings. If you're having problems with this working then I would first investigate your proxy configuration on the Smoothwall because that may be one of the causes of the performance problems you are seeing with your connections. If you are certain that's not a problem the log it with Paessler support - they are good. We use a transparent proxy here (highly recommended), which removes all of the many issues that go with traditional proxy setups.

I use PRTGs cloud monitoring and website availability features. It's not perfect, but I haven't found a better overall network monitoring system then PRTG (features and ease if use), at least for the money. http://cdn.paessler.com/common/files/pdf/whitepaper/private-cloud-monitoring_en.pdf http://www.paessler.com/info/website_availability

We don't use roaming profiles here. That was tried in the past, but there were frequent problems. We make heavy use of folder redirection, which works fantastic with no corrupt profiles or super long login times during network load. It does mean the initial login on a PC takes around a 1 minute on average to create the account and up to 2 if the network is really busy. Subsequent logins are very quick though and 1-2 minutes is perfectly acceptable to me because I know it is the upper limits a user will have to wait. Perhaps others have had more success with roaming profiles, but I just kind of gave up on them a few years ago.

Looks good, well done. What version of OSX are you running at your school? If it's 10.7 or later you could potentially do away with the "magic triangle" and bind the Macs only to the AD server and use Profiles to do the management side instead of WGM and OD. We went that route last year. Of course, there were quite a few niggles we had to get around with scripts as Profiles don't have nearly the power in many areas that WGM did. But, with Apple starting to deprecate Managed Preferences we found there wasn't much choice once you get to 10.8 and higher. And, with some of the new Macs only able to run 10.9 you start to see the creakiness of trying to force Managed Preferences where Apple no longer wants them used. Can't say I agree with that decision, but that's the reality...

Ah, yes you're right about the G5, good catch. My bad, it was past my bed time. G4s I did mean. You must have some inside info on Apple's reasons for designing their own chips? Yes, not being beholden to a single supplier is a good part of their reasoning, but efficiency (less heat, more battery life) along with power (A7 anyone) were certainly big factors as well. Manufacturing in the US doesn't guarantee quality, but when a tech company like Apple manufactures in the US they are doing so to have greater control over the manufacturing process. It's also why Sun assembled their hardware in the USA (parts manufactured elsewhere). You also do realise that BMW, Mercedes, Totyota, Nissan, and Volkswagon all manufacture in the USA as well? Mostly in the union unfriendly south though. The corrupt and heavy handed unionised labour in the north is one of the things that just about killed the American car company.

We had plenty of the Dell 820/830 models and they were solid. I think a few teachers still have some floating around at home that they bought from us. The E6500s were pure junk. I used to work for SCI (later Sanmina-SCI) and we used to build alot of the Dell kit before they decided to farm it off to the lowest bidder in China. Foxcon in 2002 did not have good quality control. The G5 Mac laptops did have heat-related problems and that was one of the reasons why the PowerPC got the flick. IBM couldn't keep up with Intel in the power/efficiency race. This is also why Apple started buying up semiconductor companies and designing their own chips for mobile devices. The Intel laptops - have been very, very solid. Only time will tell with the Retina display models, but we haven't seen any issues in the few that are floating around the school.

I was thinking the same thing. LOL

Wow, the whole school was running off of that one server? You have come a long way. Hopefully, you can encourage them to let you take that upgrade even further considering your school has 800 students, 150 staff and 750+ devices!

There have only been three (singular) issues I've seen with 2009 and later MBP's. 1. An Intel SSD that died after 12 months, replaced under warranty in 24 hours. 2. A trackpad that was smashed by a teacher's kid on a 4 year old MBP - replaced by me for only $75 3. A MBP that was toasted (literally) with a full glass of red wine poured onto the keyboard. On the other hand, we've had Dell e6500s that have required multiple repairs for multiple things including faulty screens, bezel falling apart, dead speakers, faulty keyboards, faulty logic board, faulty RAM, faulty HDDs. Now those things have been what I would call laughable. Probably the best of the PC laptops I've seen lately are some of the Ultrabooks by Asus and Samsung. But, then again they are dead ringers for MBAs...

I can't say that I remember ever seeing a similar heatsink and cooling design before for any other computer. Consoles mostly use a stock standard PC or laptop cooling design (Xbox 360 CPU Heat Sink Replacement - iFixit) and I don't know of any laptops that use a triangle shaped heatsink and logic board? I don't know how much real world experience you have with Macs (given your comments on function and lifespan), but I have owned 12 PowerMacs / Mac Pros in the past 9 years (either personally or as company IT gear) and I've only had a hardware failure on one of them of any sort. That was a power supply on a 5 year old Power Mac. Once that was replaced it went for another 3 years until I sold it. The longest lived PowerMac I had was a G4 that wouldn't die even though it was 10 years old, but wasn't much use to me anymore. I've also managed hundreds of Macs in that timeframe and failure rates have been nearly non-existent with one exception - DVD drives on 2010 Mac Minis. Those had a habit of dying and are probably one reason why they disappeared on next version of the Mini.

Wazzup Adobe! Wasn't happy today... YouTube and Mathletics broke on the PCs and Macs with this little gem until we scrambled to build a package and push out the update. I cannot wait until The day I can dance a jig on the grave of the steaming pile of dung that is Adobe Flash Player.