gl3nnym

Huh looks good! Thanks for the link :-)

Hi All I have had a search around and not found a definitive answer as yet (maybe I am just blind). We are having a lot of issues here with RM EasyLink after upgrading to CC3 Service Pack 3 on XP. It seems that EasyLink will only work well on an XP machine with IE7 installed and the WebFolder hotfix or Office installed. Is there a program out there that I can get stuck into which provides a simple link to peoples documents from the outside world? Thanks glennym.

That is quite incredible. It's always the seemingly intelligent people too -_-

Thanks! The ads have never worked for me so I just added that site and hey presto! All working.

I also have trouble reading the books but the hands on experience definitely helps.

The MS Press books can be picked up from Amazon for pretty cheap. It's only when you want better quality training that the price starts getting out of hand.

If you can get it, it's good! My company have so far paid for two courses and 1 exam. They said they will pay for my next exam too. How nice of them!

Here is the Microsoft page for the MCITP: MCITP (Microsoft Certified IT Professional) | Training Courses for IT Professionals It stands for Microsoft Certified IT Professional and shows the exams/studying needed to gain the qualification. Many people use companies like TrainSignal, CBT Nuggets and the Microsoft Press Books (available from Amazon) to study for the exams. Personally I have just used the Press Books so far but will need video training soon. Microsoft also have plenty of free Webinars and Virtual Labs on their Learning site available to download. EDIT: You can also try these sites for help and information; techexams.net , certforums.co.uk , mcmcse.com , proprofs.com . I have used these to get advice from other people taking the exams (Passed my first ever exam a few weeks ago and other peoples experiences really help). Just a note, brain dumps are bad. Steer clear of them!

I agree you should go for the MCITP. I am studying that at the moment and is the newer version of MCSE/MCSA.

I will be steering well clear of it. I don't even use my Facebook account tbh and should probably deactivate it. I must admit I am a bit of a Gmail and all over Google lover.

So tempting!

Chips!

The only thing us support staff are entitled to are 10 lashings of the whip and a bad cup of coffee if it's your birthday!

MY wife bought it for me yesterday as a surprise and what a great one it was! Brilliant game, couldn't get enough of it! There are extra game play features like the dive to prone, driving and different weapons. IMO so far it has blown my mine. Lets see how the game continues!

Wow I live like right next to that school! My current commute is a 25 mile drive..... Interesting.

We have actually managed to get people to hold the network cable at a certain angle and point the mouse laser at the monitor to get SIMS to work properly. Unfortunately, this particular member of staff has left and nobody else will fall for it.

I wish I had three screens. Two just isn't enough anymore.

Another vote for Virtual Clone Drive.

@Domino - The failover is the option I will be looking into. Obviously to get the full on migration option we would need to invest more cash and expertise into the project. Thinking about it though, as a school I am sure we can live without some services for an hour or two if we went for a similar solution to @zag

I think we would probably look at the cheaper option and go for local storage if SAN's are really that expensive. We can handle a couple of hours downtime in the event a hard drive does die and with the correct backup procedure in place, restoration should be a doddle.

@alexsanger - Thanks for the information. Sounds like your project is very similar and you seem to have some decent kit already in place. Any rough costs would be a massive help. Hope it goes well!

@j17sparky - Yes we are looking at having a SAN for high availablility. We are also looking to have two big servers which hold the VM's and in the event that one goes down, the other will have the capacity to pick up the load and run the VM's from the other box. We would want to have some extra resources for expansion but at the moment there are no plans for more services/applications. It would be nice to have the best kit we can get for the lowest cost (schools budget unfortunately). @zag - I like the sound of your solution you have going on. Obviously we want the best but money restraints much limit us the high availability options. Why would you say the SAN is not really suitable for schools? Would you say it's more suited to corporate environments? Thanks for the advice so far. Some great information!!!

Hi Domino, thanks for the reply. Here is a little more information based on what you have asked: We are currently (open to ideas) looking at having the following: 1x Physical primary domain controller 1x Physical smart cache 2x Big servers (ESX or other) to hold the rest of the servers virtually. Ideally half and half but with the capacity to run all VM's on one box for high availability Currently most of our servers have 2x Intel Xeon 2.66Ghx processors and either 2GB or 4GB of RAM. At the moment we roughly have about 26/27GB of RAM over all the servers. A very rough estimation or hard disk space allocated over all servers at the moment is 1.8-2.0TB. The CPU usage, being honest is next to nothing. The processors at the moment seem pretty good and the servers seem to sit idle most of the time. Average RAM usage hovers at around 0.8-1.5GB per server. The servers we currently have are licensed through RM and whilst virtualising we would be looking at CC4 too (depending on how our current RM Ones will handle it, but that's another topic). In my mind at the moment we would be looking at two servers with the following rough specs: 2x Dual or quad core processors, maybe one of the Intel 'i' range? 32GB RAM We would look at two of these with a SAN of maybe 8TB. Thanks for the advice so far. Without the right expertise this is quite a big subject!

Usually I am not one to bump but.... please? You would be helping a fellow techie in need :-)

I prefer the older look. This update failed many times to me too.