ianh64

Thanks for responses. I did take on board a raised hourly rate vs the local authority advertised ones and had planned to add something about flexibility but the decision appears to have been made to go for an external IT firm. I had hoped to convince the head that the school could continue to do it in house but looks like time has run out as I have handed over the system to the firm. I had personally supported the school for last 3+ years but it was time for the school to fend for itself. The hours needed to support the system was twice what the school gets now and they have been delighted with how their IT systems have been supported, how they have performed and how they have been utterly reliable. Where they could have done with extra help is to have a bit more of an on site presence (most support was remote except the odd half day) for the odd more technical job that their designated staff members could not handle. The firm that took over did a full audit of system and were utterly amazed at what had been achieved on their budget. I think the firm have realised that there is not much money to be made from the school, but even so, the rate that they charge still means that the school IT budget is likely to go through the roof. If the school had kept things in house, the increase would have been reasonable, but it seems that convincing the school that finding someone with the flexibility needed to support their system, as I have, is going to be much harder than they would be prepared to participate.

The rate and timetabling is typical for adverts being posted by local LEA in this area for their own schools of similar size and type. If server crashes, manual contingency plans still allow school to function. They also have staff on site who can deal with day to day running and future planning and an external support contract for their MIS system. But the staff on site are not Microsoft server people, so whilst they can add users and PC's themselves etc, they just need a helping hand from someone a bit more server literate who can run just undertake the routine weekly tasks. The school understand that the server may be down for 48 hours etc. Server has not crashed affecting BAU in the 2+ years that it was installed. Its really someone who can check the server once a week and deal with any things that on site staff cannot or have the time to do.

If anyone would be interested, please PM me and I will pass on the schools contact details for this.

Currently a hypothetical question, prior to passing on findings to the headmaster. Currently the school is looking at outsourcing to an IT company to look after all their IT and I recon they could do it cheaper and better in house. One outsourcing company said that they would not let anyone on £10/hr touch a server and their staff would need qualifications before being allowed to touch a clients server. If a small independent school based Surrey, approx 50 devices, 5 servers (2 physical, others virtual) wanted a part time person to support their IT system, would there likely to be any competent applicants if either of the following positions/rates were advertised? Rates are say nearest £. Both 4 hours per week, 40 weeks per year (term time and bit of holiday). ICT Technician £10/hr Network Manager £16/hr By competent applications, I mean by person who could be trusted to look after all aspects of IT, including servers, software and hardware deployment, Exchange etc... How would the level of competency differ between Technician and Network Manager? If unlikely to get any takers, what would they need to be looking at? Thanks Ian

This is now resolved. Michael at BA remotely investigated this and we found a working solution. For future reference... Basically I was not doing anything wrong but there is some anomaly with the BA software that I found. When performing a manual export, everything worked fine however when running as a job in conjunction with other file backup jobs, it failed. The solution was to create a dedicated exchange backup job and not run with other file backup jobs. When this was done, the automated backups worked fine. My initial reason for keeping Exchange backup as part of file backup was to resolve any scheduling issues with running two jobs close together. After learning a bit more about BA I now see this as a non issue as if BA handles all backup jobs it will queue jobs until late running backups complete. All in all, BA is a pretty good product that I can recommend, especially with the educational discounts that they offer. As I found, it's not always quite as easy to configure things as maybe it should, but support is good and for very modest cost is a great time saver for some of the backup jobs that cannot be easily achieved with MS backup alone.

Hi Thanks for the continuing assistance. Backup Assist reports the following error for every Exchange user. I assume its an error initially reported by Exchange Server 2010. Exchange Mailbox for LEO: January - March 2012 BA4320 Exbackup failed when preparing to backup one or more mailboxes Help Additional Information: (E) [Folder ''] CreateMMAPIMailboxSession: MMAPICreateExchangeMailboxSession(LEO, "/o=xxx School/ou=Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT)/cn=Recipients/cn=Alexander.C") failed * (E) [Folder ''] MutexedCreateServiceA: CreateMsgService(MSEMS) error -- Specified item not found* Completion code: 20 I am suspicious of the [Folder ''] bit which possibly indicates that some folder has not been correctly specified. But I cannot find any way of knowing what BA is actually trying to get Exchange to do. The Event log on the server is does not provide any more information. The only thing that I can find on the remote (LEO Exchange Server) machine is the BA backupdevice account successfully logging in (login type 3), then about 15 second later, logging out. The initial manual export of mailboxes occurs correctly and the .pst folders are successfully created. This is run from the administrator account on the Backup Assist server (GRIFFIN), which is also a DC. The Exchange Server (LEO) is a hyper-V server. Both are running 2008R2. However, when the backup itself starts, it runs under the (effectively non interactive) user account "backupdevice" which is in the Users OW, primary group Domain Users (tried also Domain Admins) and is as member of the following groups : Administrators, Backup Operators, Domain Admins, Domain Users, Organizational Management and Schema Admins. When the backup runs, it fails with the error above. I wonder if I need to additionally give it Enterprise Admins and Group Policy Creator Owners just to make it the same as the Administrator account.

Hi Thanks for the link. The link is for the standard backup assist not the Exchange Mailbox add-on which is what we are using. The Exchange Mailbox add-in allows backing up of exchange mailboxes from a remote machine which is exactly what we want to do. However, the white paper you posted contained a link to the exchange mailbox add-on which I had not seen before. So I will go through this carefully and see if I am missing anything. Personally I think the requirement for a local admin user is phooey and the fact that I can successfully perform the initial export but not the automated backups probably indicates something like permissions - I encountered similar with the SQL remote backup but thankfully the SQL logs were more helpful and I could track down the permissioning error - mainly due to SQL server running as a network service so I needed to make sure that there were suitable permissions setup for the network service to write to the relevant folders and shares that BA expects. If I was a betting man, I would bet on it being similar with Exchange 2010 - I just need to find what Exchange is running as and where it is trying to write to. -Ian

1. No. exchange is on a remote non DC server 2. ? I cannot have a local user on a DC or only if Exchange is installed? 3. BA technical support says so 4. ?

Thanks for assisting... 1. On the server - User accounts/Manage User Accounts/Add. It also does it when running netplwiz direct or via other means that ultimately invoke netplwiz. I have tried leaving domain blank and putting the host name in. It could be something silly like I am not putting the right info in add user dialog boxes. 2. Its a domain controller 3. We are using BA to backup user mailboxes on a remote exchange server via Exchange Mailbox add-on.. BA support say that we need to add an additional local user with administrator privs with exactly the same name as the domain user (domain admin) that we run BA with. I am sceptical but BA support wont progress unless we exhaust this avenue. 4. See below: Log Name: Application Source: Application Hang Date: 13/01/2012 10:32:55 Event ID: 1002 Task Category: (101) Level: Error Keywords: Classic User: N/A Computer: griffin.xxx.school Description: The program NetplWiz.exe version 6.1.7600.16385 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Action Center control panel. Process ID: 7398 Start Time: 01ccd1de4c931223 Termination Time: 15 Application Path: C:\Windows\system32\NetplWiz.exe Report Id: ea482112-3dd1-11e1-bda6-0010186ba802

BUMP Can everyone else add local users to their AD server without netplwiz (no matter what method it is invoked, ie directly, via add user control panel etc) going non responsive then going into apphang state? Looking on the web, many other people have the same issue. But I cannot find a solution, although experts exchange looks like it may have one, but won't let me see the solution unless I provide CC details and risk a monthly charge, which I am not going to do.

I am currently trialling BackupAssist on our Server 2008R2 system. I have a problem backing up our remote Exchange Server 2010 mailboxes. I have been in contact with BackupAssist (BA) and they say that I need to create a local non domain dedicated account for BA on our BA host in addition to our domain dedicated BA account. When I try and create this local account, the add user dialogue stops responding and the event logs indicate a netplwiz.exe application hang. Runnin netplwiz.exe and alternatives all result in the same non responsiveness. I left it running overnight and still the same. When the command was killed, no user was created. Scouring the web, seems like I am not alone with this, but I have yet to find a solution. Seems like people get it even on a fresh install - some have hinted its AD related. So I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. I can't get BA Exchange Backup to work without adding the user. If anyone has solutions for either, I'm all ears. In return, if anyone is having problems with SQL Server remote backup via BA, I fathomed that one out so can pass this knowledge on.

We did apply the hotfix very early on in the investigation of this issue which, whilst it resolved the issue when you occasionally had to log in twice, it did not resolve the issue with the system hanging at login. We never got to the bottom of the problem as turning off sleep/hibernation was an adequate fix for us. Since applying SP1, I have not revisited the issue either to see if there is something in SP1 that may fix it.

Thanks. I will look over the kb more thoroughly when I am infront of a school machine. Re #1. The kb mentions a hotfix for Outlook 2003. Does this mean that this functionality is already in Outlook 2007 and 2010? Also, is the hotfix included in any of the Office 2003 Sp's? Re #1/2. We already run our office inbox as role based, however it ios never used to send emails. However I had previously asked a member of the office to test this and IIRC that they said that they could not select the office mailbox and send from it even if they wanted to. I guess I had not set up the privs to allow them to do this.

Funding magazine have been made aware of this thread but whether they will act is another matter entirely. I have only read the magazine as a paper edition. I don't know if there is an online version. It is largely a marketing magazine so It would be good if there could be some real world perspective that was available to counter the marketing guff. My personal opinion is that many independent schools are relatively small, but the requirements for IT systems and support needed to run the MIS systems are often an overlooked yet significant additional expense. The administrative staff can be easily wooed by nice features but the cost from the it budget to support this can be a huge cost. We got caught out by the new staff portal. Nice on paper but totally omitted from the product coatings was the cost of the SQL server license.

Not an issue anymore. Decided to purchase two copies of Professional. The office can justify Professional as it includes floorplans. But if anyone does know, I would be interested in knowing the answer.