robknowles

Hello, I've managed to find a couple of places that sell those NorcoTek 12 bay units in the UK. They look very good for the price - thanks for the find. ADP Solutions (http://www.adpsolutionsltd.com) and UltimateStorage.com. Rob

Hello, I would either a) Plug one into a UPS and the other into the mains (via a surge protector) b) Plug each power lead into two different UPS I recommend this because a couple of summers ago (on the exam results download day) I had a UPS suddenly die and having both leads in meant the 5 servers connected to it went straight down, so plugging into two different devices would add redundancy. Rob

Hello, Just before Xmas we did a tender for roughly 140 machines from Stone and I'm very impressed. They delivered in stages for me, all I had to do is ring up and say can I have the next batch on this date and about this time and it turned up as requested. Friendly and knowledgeable staff. Also part of the tender was almost 60 Samsung laptops. One of them developed a fault on one stick of ram, rang up and somebody was out by mid-day the next day onsite to fix the laptop - can't say better than that!! Rob

Hello, Whenever we give a laptop to a member of staff a laptop we get them to sign a piece a paper saying that they are not allowed to install software (apart from drivers, ISP settings etc) and that only a member of the ICT Support Team can do so. Thanks, Rob

Hello, I'm wondering how often other schools replace their backup tapes and how often they are used (i.e. each tape used once a week etc)? Also what backup schedules do users use as well. I'm looking, now I've just brought a Tape Auto-loader, at doing a full backup on the Friday night (so it runs over the weekend) and then an incremental backup every day and have two sets of tapes so I've got two recent weeks worth of backups and also two sets of tapes for monthly full backups. Rob

Hello, I run a vanilla Windows 2003 Domain network with XP Clients (+ 1 Vista), and basically I'm looking for a new User Management System to replace the current Akhter solution which I find lacking in features and expensive (about £2.5K a year). I know many on the site have vanilla networks and just wonder what programs you use to automate user management (i.e. bulking creating users, or just creating single users and ensuring that profiles are created, allocated to the correct groups and also home folder share created with the neccessary permissions, ability to reset passwords and such like) Rob

Hello, I'm hopefully looking at implementing an iSCSI Storage system within the school at some point this year. I would just like to know what sort of kit - i.e. Dell, Intel, EMC etc - and what they think of it mainly price, expandability and performance. I'm looking at either purchasing two units, one for SAS HDDs (for use by VMWare ESX Virtual Machines, Exchange Stores and Cluster Disks), and one for SATA HDDs (for User Areas's, Shared Documents, Disk Backups, VCD's and such like). If anybody does run VMWare ESX Server with iSCSI Targets I'd be interested in hearing about performance. Rob

1) Yes that's correct. You could to save cash connect to SAN Unit to your main core switch, but I would recommended purchasing a seperate switch as you suggested and connecting the servers and san to it (that's how I will be doing it). You will use the iSCSI software (probably the Windows one) to attach the drive letter to a iSCSI Target 2) The iSCSI device will have management software and then you can add the disk and then configure the system and then if increase the size for the different 'disks' 3) On the device you can setup RAID 5, and most should support RAID 10/50 etc. You should be able to setup a Hotswap Spare as well. Rob

Hello, I definitely recommend going to Virtual Machines for some tasks (though I personally would leave ISA Boxes, SQL Servers and Domain Controllers as physical servers). I've just put a server in here - a 2 x Quad 2.33GHz, with 8GB Ram and 2 x 73GB SAS HDD - 15K RPM that are Raid 1 to host the ESX Server and Swap Partition etc, and 4 x 300GB HDD SAS 15K RPM - RAID 10 to host the Virtual Machine Images. Performance is excellent - I'm amazed how little usage is made barely 2GHz is reached and that's running about 8 Virtual Machines, of which my Sophos Server and Printer Server is part of. I've noticed no performance issues since Virtualising these. What I'm looking at doing this year (budget dependent) is to upgrade the higher version of VMWare ESX Server and install an additional 8GB Ram, and then purchase an additional server to run VMWare ESX as a replacement for a couple of older ones. I'm also looking at buying a iSCSI SAN so I can host the VM Images on this and in case one server fails the VMWare ESX Server will simply transfer the VM Machines that were running on the failed one and then continue on the new one. Rob