ben604

Hello! We've been given the go-ahead to start investigating virtualisation fully and been assigned £500ish to buy a test bed server. Has anyone got anything they want rid of, obviously the higher spec the better. I guess min specs would be: Xeon Dual/Quad core 6GB+ ram Hardware RAID 2TB across 4 drives (we need at least 1.2TB usable to test our Server 2008 DC backups) Doesn't have to be particularly pretty....just functional! Send me or ReggieP a message if you have anything available. We're in the North West, on the Wirral. Thanks, Ben.

I used to work for an IP reseller/installer and I'd second the above recommendation. Best image quality on the market and the cameras are extremely robust. Depends on your budget I suppose. Give my old company, Network Webcams, a ring - 0151 633 2111, tell them you're ringing from a school and they should give you a decent discount. They do free next day delivery, and you can try for 14 days and they'll give you a refund if you're not happy! Very nice company!

What are your specific requirements? Will you need two simultaneous mic inputs? What's being recorded? We use Lexicon Alpha's and they're great, very solid and simple to use, but only one mic and one instrument input.

Can I echo the above also!

Right, we've had our local authority in to lend a hand and they've done some good work so far, we think... We can now authenticate against the Domain, which is a start. We're still having trouble with replication though. I've attached the dcdiag info for both DCs. If any of you kind gentlemen could take a look, we'd be eternally grateful!dcdiagDC1.txt dcdiagDC2.txt

Hello! I work alongside Reg here, sorry for the late reply, some gents from a school down the road came to take a look in the flesh. I've tried "netdom query FSMO" and it reports that the domain is not available. netdiag /v - windows doesn't recognise the command. I've attached dcdiag /v @ Firefox - Netlogon and sysvol are both not shared or available. dcdiag.txt

we can ping prentonhigh.local, yes. It resolves to Prenton1, our PDC. It looks like the problem is the Sysvol folder is not shared. This is tied into file replication, which is where the problem started. Is there a way to stop replication between DC1 and DC2 so we can get the sysvol folder shared from just DC1?

Ah, I only play TDM. I'm still trying to find a replacement for Counterstrike and Quake. This isn't far off... Crouch only is ace, you've got to use your ears to hear reloading, someone walking into a chair then calmly sneak round a corner and take them out!

I'm a PC Black Ops gamer! Had it since launch, but I'm only just starting to put the time in on it. Just got a 40" 1080p LCD over christmas and it's looks amazing at full resolution. I particularly like crouch only servers, very tense. Not touched the single player, rarely do on FPS games.

It was in the holidays so I wasn't harassing them, I'm sure they'd turn them around quicker under duress...

We installed one of the Casio LED projectors in March this year, we had to send it back in the summer with an overheating fault...That's been the only glitch, otherwise the image is great, functionality is good and it's very easy to set up and configure. They turned the repair around in about 15 days.

A word of warning though, Steam won't work behind a proxy. We just got some 27" top end iMacs and wanted to see what they could do, but couldn't find one direct download demo of a new game to try out!

We run Moodle on a Casio calculator. Ok not quite, but we have 700 users and run Moodle on a Dual-Core workstation - E4500, 2GB Ram, 1TB Drive, single 1gbit nic! It's backed up fully once a week and incrementally every day. The HDD failed a couple of weeks ago, took 25 minutes to get it back up and running from a backup. It was installed on that originally as a test, but it's pretty much rock solid. That HDD failure is the first time in 2 years that we've had any downtime on Moodle which wasn't planned.

Just did some further checks, turns out there are 2 x E5420s in each server, giving us 4 cores per server.

Hi Chris, Thanks for that. That's exactly the type of answer I wanted/needed! This is all preliminary at the moment, I'm just checking options, getting rough ideas of cost etc... From the looks of it, we're not a million miles away with regards to hardware, which is good for cost. We're going to buy a little virtualisation testbed machine (quad opteron, 4gb) to have a fiddle with over the next 8 months with a view to at least part virtualising next summer, so we can run the tests/benchmarks that you suggest during that time also.

Trying to get my head around virtualisation...not easy as there seems to be infinite permutations as to what you can achieve with what hardware/software! Could you guys give me a nod in the right direction... We're a mid sized secondary with 800 users, and 350 machines. We have the following hardware: 2 x Dell PowerEdge 2950s running 2 x Dual Core Xeon E5420 @ 2.5Ghz 8GB Ram 4 x 400GB 10k SAS drives These are currently configured as DCs and between them handle DNS, DHCP, File Serving etc... We have some old legacy HP and RM servers running our SIMS server, AntiVirus and Print services and some desktops running Mahara, Moodle and Censornet. For storage, we have the 3TB 10k SAS storage locally in the Dells and a further 4TB, connected via fibre, in a Promise E310f (just checked, these are only Hitachi 7K1000 750GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5", not sure if they're too slow? Could we swap the SAS drives in the Dells for these and add a couple more? We'd like to consolidate as many of the servers onto the two Dells probably using VMWare ESXi (going on recommendations from here). We'd just like to know if the above hardware will achieve what we require and if not, what updates will we need to make etc...I'm guessing we'll need to bump the RAM up at the very least. Thanks in advance guys, we're obviously completely new to the virtualisation side of things, but I'm sure after a couple of replies, we'll get the hang of it and start moving in the right direction!

Right, just checked VMWare Free ESXi and it's a compatible product, which is a good start! Now, to continue my investigation. Thanks for the pointer James.

Hello, Bit of a "don't really know what I've got" thread here... We had a suite of Macs installed (before our current support teams time), along with a Mac Server with a Promise VTrak E310f attached for storage. Anyway, we use the mac server to control the mac workstation environment, but very little else and storage is handled by our Server 2008 shares. The question is, could we use the VTrak (which I've already attached to one of our Dell 2950 Server 2008 boxes) as a SAS array (via fibre) for a virtualized setup if we decided to go down that route? I believe the E310f is sold as a Mac storage solution, so I'm not sure if they're compatible? Is it a quick enough box to handle virtualization? Any info would be very useful! Cheers, Ben.

£10 + P&P each?

Hello, We purchased a number of netbooks over the summer and immediately upgraded them to 2GB ram, so we have 56 x brand new 1GB sticks for sale. Part number is M470T2864QZ3-CF7. Price is say £15 each + P&P? Thanks for looking. Ben.

Hello! Try this Help Desk Software HESK - a free PHP help desk it's free and will run alongside Joomla if you're running apache.

We also have a VLK and experienced a couple of machines doing the same yesterday morning, however a restart yesterday afternoon has resolved the problem. Could it have been a problematic WSUS update that was fixed?

Ooh, already posted for advice without introducing myself. How rude! I'm Ben, working in my first ICT role as a technician at Prenton High School with ReggieP. Hello!

Right, left this issue alone for a while and gave the teachers restricted local logons to skirt the issue while we had bigger fish to fry, but more teachers want to use WMVs so we need a solution! When logging in locally, they play with no issues, both streamed and saved files, so it's got to be something in our group policy or in our mandatory profiles. Any ideas?

Hey ReggieP, thanks for your reply There's a particular site we're trying to use in our French department: French videos Each activity has a video and while the player loads fine, the video wont start...