robknowles

1) S 2) 1360 3) 2.2m x 3.8m 4) No 5) Yes - office and and a store room knocked together 6) 4 Racks 7) APC 8) 3 Racks (Server etc) are 42U - 60cm wide and 1.1m depth, 1 Rack (Comms) is 42U - 80cm wide and 1.1m depth) 9) Server Rack - 18U Servers, 2U ToR Switches (rest is empty), Storage Rack - 16U SANs, 3U iSCSI Switches (rest is empty), VDI/Backup Rack - 15U Servers, 2U Shelf for Mac Mini/Securus/Time Capsule, 2U Tapeloader, 2U ToR Switches (rest is empty), Comms Rack, 11U Patch Panels, 9U Switches/Routers/Firewalls/Ruckus Controller. (rest is empty) 10) Server/SAN Racks, about 12 Amps Drawn and Comms Rack about 5amps. 15000KVA UPS is available that services all racks. 11) Not sure 12) Servers etc racks about 190-200KG, Comms about 100KG 13) 10KW plus 7KW Thanks, Rob

Hi, I phoned Apple today and the only way of doing it is via a Credit Card, and we can't use the normal vouchers. I'm speaking to our finance team to investigate whether there's a way we can get a prepaid debit/credit card, so we can attach it to that but there will be a relative low balance that Finance can top up now and again. Cheers, Rob

One thing to check is that Charging is enabled in the BIOS. Some Dell laptops allow the ability to charge batteries to be disabled.

Hello all, OK, so i'm setting up a BYOD VLAN to support staff, student and potentially visitor mobile devices. We run Smoothwall Filtering, Ruckus Wireless and an edge network consisting of HP ProCurve & Dell ProConnect switches) and a 'core switches/router' which are Dell Proconnect to link servers, edge switches together (this are connected via 2 or 4 x 10Gbits/s Trunks (not stacked using the Dell Stacking module, but SFP+ leads instead). Hopefully you can see the attached image, with the basic layout of the network (obviously with many more edge switches, but you get the idea). Smoothwall is setup now for a transparent proxy on a separate interface and the Ruckus BYOD SSID is tagged to VLAN 20. The Core Router, has the VLAN setup along with IP Address for the subnets (routing is setup and fine between subnets on our default vlan) I'm just wondering now about correctly setting up to allow data to come off the Ruckus Access Points, and for the port on the switch that connects to our Smoothwall server to be setup for the interface on the VLAN (within Smoothwall I've created a VLAN interface, and setup with VLAN 20 and given it an IP Address within this range, specifically 10.0.0.10). From what I can gather, I need to tag the uplink ports on all the HP/Dell Edge switches and tag the uplink ports/trunks between the core switches/router as well. On the Procurve switches, there's no such thing at the Trunk VLAN mode for ports, simple Forbid, Tag, Untag and Auto from the GUI Menu (unless I can configure this via the CLI somehow. I'm guessing I need to create VLAN 20 on each switch containing a Ruckus Access Point, and tag the ports that contain the Access Points and the uplink port? I think I've set this up correct as I can ping the gateway on the Router, and can ping the the other ip addresses the router has as well for other subnets. However, I can't ping the Smoothwall server - don't think it's the setup on this particular, rather the way I've got tagging worked on the port connecting the switch up. At any point do I need to untag? Hope this makes, if you can help then thanks in advanced. Cheers, Rob

Hello, Over the summer we have replaced some of the equipment within the Academy. We will be selling some of the equipment so please let me know if you are interested... 2 x Dell PowerEdge 2900 - 5U Rack Mount Server. Has 2 x Quad Core Xeon 5345 Processor (2.33 GHz), with 24GB Ram, 2 x Dual Port Intel NICs and 2 x Onboard NIC (all Gigabit) , iDRAC Enterprise and RAID controller with 256MB Battery backed cache. Will have 4 x HDD Caddy Bays (no HDDs though - supports SAS and if you purchase a Dell interposer SATA as well). Dual Power Redundant PSU. Runs vSphere 5 fine. (Looking for £180 each). 1 x Dell PowerEdge 2900 - 5U Rack Mount Server. Has 1 x Dual Core Xeon Processor. 4 GB Ram. Will have 4 x HDD Caddy Bays (no HDDs though). Dual Power Redundant PSU, however, one PSU has failed. (Looking for £80) 4 x Dell PowerEdge 2800 - Tower Server. (2 Servers with 7GB Ram, one server is with 4GB Ram and the other with 3GB), No HDDs – but will accept SCSI 80 PIN HDDs – I will have 16 HDD Carriers between them, 2 x Intel Xeon 2.8GHz Processors (Single Core but 64 Bit Capable), Redundant Power Supplies. Raid controller with battery back cache (256MB). Did run ESX 3.5 fine, but not ESX 4. (Looking for £20 each) 1 x Infotrend EonStor SAN, model ES-A16E-G2130-4 (Infortrend EonStor A16E-G2130-4 iSCSI to SATA-II 3U/16-bay RAID). It features, Single, user-swappable controller. Has 4 x 1Gbits/s Ports and a 100Mbits/s Management Port. Controller was upgraded to 2GB Ram Cache (the official Infortrend part, I will ship with the original 512MB Cache as well). Dual Power Supplies. Dual Cooling FANs. Rackmount Kit. Supports 16 SATA Hard Drives (comes with 16 x Drive Carriers and screws as well - NO Hard-Drives provided). We had 750GB Hard-Drives in it, but the compatibility guide says it supports up to 2TB Disks at least. Supports RAID 0, 1, 5 and 6 and hot spare disks. Certified for VMware ESX 3.x and vSphere 4.0 and 4.1 according to Infortrend's website, and I believe Windows 2008/2008 R2 certification as well (Looking for £150) 2 x QLogic Dual Port Hardware iSCSI Adaptors (QLA-4052C - PCI-X, Dual Port) (Looking for £25 each) Prices above assume collection (Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands). Items will be available from Mid September. Non of the items have warranties left on and thus will be sold without warranty or support of any kind. Thanks, 
Rob

Hello, Yes, for the PowerConnect at least. I have 2 x 6248 running our iSCSI SAN Switches. I also have a 8024F Core, linked via trunked 10Gbits/s links to 2 x 7024F and 2 x 7048 switches, that connect our servers and edge switches. Have got a few 5548 switches as well. Seem pretty good switches (apparently Brocade rebadged). Work fine, relatively cheap and regular firmware updates for new features/bug fixes. Did use to be a big fan of HP, but compared to the Dell they are more expensive now. Regarding the Force10 switches, I did look at these as the core, however, the cost was pretty big and I didn't need the connectivity/speed offered at the time, but in the future when I put 10Gbits/s links to every edge switch then this is something I may look at. Thanks, Rob

Hello, Within the next 2 weeks, after expanding our Ruckus Wireless system with new APs, we will have 34 of our older HP ProCurve 420 Wireless Access Points available. We are looking for £700 for the lot (Just over £20 each) if you collect - although we are open to sensible offers. Another £20 on top if you wish us to courier them over. They will have the Wireless Unit, the mounting bracket and power adaptor (never tested these as we've only ever used PoE). They are Wireless B/G spec, with a single radio design with 2 antennas. Configurable both via CLI and Web. Specification link is here HP ProCurve 420 Wireless Access Point Specifications and features - HP Business Support Center If you are interested let me know. As I said they should be ready to collect within the next 2 weeks and our Finance department will send an invoice to your school. Thanks, Rob

Hi, Thanks for your thoughts. I gave VDI in a box a go yesterday. Really nice and easy to setup on a test laptop, bearing in mind I've never touched Hyper V before yesterday (I'm a vSphere user). We are going to run it on around 80 machines initially. I'm migrating from a RDS setup on 80 of our existing clients to a virtual desktop. I've been using VMWare View for the past 3 years on our other 80 thin clients, the problem is that it's too expensive for both the licensing and server/storage infrastructures. I'll give Citrix XenDesktop a go next week. I want to see if I can provision storage locally with the Golden Image replicated across the hosts in a VDI in a box fashion. Has done something like this before? Thanks, Rob

Hello, I’m just after thoughts from people who have looked at either Citrix VDI in a Box or Citrix XenDesktop VDI Edition. I do like the idea of Citrix VDI in a box as it looks really easy to manage and looks fairly scalable to a few hundred desktops at least, but I’m leaning more towards the XenDesktop solution as it offers the flexibility in the future in terms of the upgrade path to be more advanced editions/features even if it’s more time consuming to install in the first instance. Just trying to see if anyone else has compared to the two side by side and what their thoughts were and how they progressed? Also, has anybody run Citrix XenDesktop VDI edition in a similar fashion to VDI in a box, where they have several physical Hyper-V Servers running desktops from local storage and not from a central SAN? Thanks for any feedback, Cheers, Rob

Hello, Over the summer I'm looking at implementing BYOD using our existing Ruckus Wireless network. The wireless part is setup, users can authenticate using their AD login details and access limited resources, Internet etc. One issue is that when I look at our DNS list, as well as all of our devices we too are getting entries from client devices. I'm wondering how you split these off in your schools where you have BYOD? I've thought of seperate DNS servers and a zone such as (client name).byod.schoolname.local. This way I can stop any potential issues of client devices being renamed to existing DNS names for servers etc and causing issues. If you can you offer any suggestions I'd appreciate it. Cheers, Rob

Hi, Over the summer we might be upgrading three of our older ESXi Servers and go down to 2, but I've been looking at our Windows RDS solution (2 Servers) and have been thinking about repurposing these servers, as they are quite meaty - 2 x Quad Core Intel Xeons, 72GB Ram, 450GB Local 15K RPM Storage etc. In turn I've been looking at running these existing RDS Servers on these SuperMicro Cloud Servers Supermicro | Products | SuperServer | MicroCloud | 5037MC-H8TRF I've had some rough costs around the £9K-£10K mark fully built and configured, with 8 Nodes, each with 32GB Ram, Single Intel E3 Processor and 240GB SSD. Granted I won't be able to have as many users/server, but with 8 servers this more than makes up for it and gives me room for furthur expansion. Additionally, it will resolve issues where older, flakier educational software crashes or grinds servers slow will just affect a fewer amount of users, and with the 240GB SSD will mean that they will fly! What are people's thoughts? Also I've read some in the past on the forum, which I can't find at the moment a member who's gone with basic hardware attached to metal sheets in a Google server fashion - can anyone remember who he was? Also, has anybody got any suggestions on other similar cases - I'd rather go with Core i5/i7 based processors, which are only slightly slower but a lot cheaper than having the Xeon and ECC Memory equivalents. Cheers, Rob

Hello, I've recently had a quote for our Microsoft EES Agreement and the pricing they provided was very competitive, much less than competitors such as Pugh etc and I just wanted to know if anybody had previously brought licensing from them. I believe they were previously named PC-Ware? Thanks, Rob

Hi, Yes, we are having a similar issue which I'm looking into. Windows 7 Clients (64 Bit Enterprise), Windows 2008 R2 File Server and have Symantec EndPoint Protection 11 Cheers, Rob

Hi, In each server cabinet I have 2 PDU's - one is connected to the mains (via a mains filter/surge protector) and the other PDU is connected to a UPS (3 Phase APC 15KVa). Each PDU is on it's own 16 Amp Circuit Breaker - 2 fuse boards - one directly to the mains and the other is connected to the UPS output. Each device that has two PSUs (which is basically everything other than a couple of devices) can then fail over if required. This way if the mains goes off the devices run of the UPS and if the UPS were to break then everything would run of the mains. We can then turn of individual PDU's as required and if anything trips then other stuff should remain unaffected. Like yourself I'm going to look at a getting a 2nd UPS, so per rack each PDU would be connected to an individual UPS for resilience. Cheers, Rob

Hi, Just noticed the following thread (http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-server-2008-r2/86860-slow-logons-applying-folder-redirection.html), which mcrompton01 points to two links: 2008R2 - GPClient is taking a long time to handle the logon request (Up to 1 hour) You experience a long domain logon time in Windows 7 or in Windows Server 2008 R2 after you deploy Group Policy preferences to the computer I won't try installing it until when we get back in January, but this fix the issue. Cheers, Rob

Hello, Neither of those seem to apply for us. The RDS Sessions seems to log off properly - it's either the server locks up or future logins stop on the Group Policy Client. For the second one I don't use Terminal Session item-level targeting at present. Cheers, Rob

Hi, Just to let you know I had the same issue with one of my servers that I was having before the summer last week. Had to hard reboot it since I couldn't login at all and was stuck on Group Policy Client for ages. Left it overnight and luckily it was fine in the morning. As I said before we run Symantec EndPoint Protection and you run Sophos so I doubt it's the AV here. What Intel Network Cards/Drivers do you use - it's a Dell R710 we have so whether it's an Intel NIC/Driver related issue. For us it definitely isn't a switch issue (to which the server connects to) as we replaced our core switch (Hp 4108GL) to a Dell PowerConnect over the summer, for which it's now happened on both. One last thing we occassional have users who can login to the server fine, however, when they use Internet Explorer they can't access external websites only Internal ones. Accessing an External one simple presents an error "This page can not be displayed". Logging off/on, updating GP doesn't work - other users can be using the Internet fine on the server. The only way to fix this is to delete their profile off the server. I'm wondering whether it's an issue to do with a faulty Group Policy somewhere - sometimes when users login their Folder Redirection isn't applied - a GP Update or logoff/on can fix this - that said the issue is never experienced on normal desktop pcs. Cheers, Rob

Hello, Couldn't get it to work in the end so we went back to using Windows 7 - we didn't have a contract for Successmaker so we aren't eligible to upgrade. Thanks, Rob

Hello, What AntiVirus do you run on it? I've had exactly the same issue a few times, most of which required a rebuild. Since installing the latest Symantec AntiVirus Endpoint Protection Client (11.7 I think) I haven't had the issue yet since September. Do you run any other monitoring software - we also ran Impero on it, which I thought may have been another cause. Thanks, Rob

Hi, I've resolved the issue. In IE we have, in addition to the proxy settings, have the checkbox "Automatically detect settings" ticked. Unticking this got it working perfect. I'm guessing the Java program was trying to use this for local communications possibly? Anyway, connects first time, quickly and appears to work correctly. Cheers, Rob

Hello, We are having issues trying to get Google App Inventor to work reliably within school. The website part works fine but we have issues with the Java based blocks editor. Has anybody else had issues with loading the blocks editor within the My Blocks tab it doesn't load the content up - it's just blank. Thanks, Rob

I think it's more to do with the floods in Thailand - Thai floods flush storage channel clean ? Channel Register Basically WD and Seagates have had major factories shutdown because of the flooding.

Hello, We are looking at allowing students to print with their own laptops to a printer. Rather than connecting to it via a USB Wired Cable, I'm wondering if there's any products that you've used that allows students to use a USB Wireless Dongle that means they can print - I'm looking at Wireless USB, rather than an USB Dongle that allows them to get onto a wireless network. Or perhaps you can suggest another way. Thanks, Rob

Hi, Thanks for the info. All very useful. Cheers, Rob

Hi Glennda, thanks for the info very useful. If anybody else has anything to add that would be great.