mbyrew

IT Strategy The time has come to take stock of where we are in terms of IT Systems. The past five years have been very good and our systems have performed well. The task now is to look at what we have got and map it against current and future requirements and from this build a Strategy for the next five years. My question to the Edugeek community is this:- ‘Does anyone have a template IT Strategy or an example of one that they would be prepared to make available as an example of good practice?’

I’m trying to sort out a Kerberos issue that requires me to edit /etc/authorization. I have a Mac mounted via Firewire as a drive on another Mac and I can see the contents of the drive in spotlight but not the /etc partition. Can you please tell me how I can get into /etc to edit it. Thanks

AD Infinitum does it for me. Plus it's really good for other AD actions like relocating 1200 Home Folder and TS-Home Folder details or identifying inactivate users by existing login names and last login date. Sure, purists will say that powershell will do this but AD Infinitum does not really need learning or require that you have a programmers orientated brain

I don't suppose that there are any SQL gurus out there who could explain in words of one sylabul or less the key differences between Full and Simple backup recovery models and the effect that each would have on the transaction logs. I'm sure that I'm not the only one out there who is slightly confused by it all. Thanks. Martin

Thanks Mic for your reply. Although it always was the case I had all the photos visible in 10.2 but not in 10.3 until they were renamed. Strange, but it may prove useful to someone. Regards, Martin

Since upgrading to 10.3 we had difficulty viewing the photographs of some students in eportal whilst others displayed fine. A check of security rights showed that all images had the same security settings and the Settings.xml file was checked and correct. After some indepth diagnostics we discovered that student photographs with an upper case extension [.JPG] failed to display whilst others with [.jpg] displayed as normal. Renaming all of the files to a common lower case extension resolved the issue. Work around / fix:- c: cd facility\eportal\webapps\eportal\eportal\images\stuphotos copy *.jpg *.jp1 copy *.jp1 *.jpg Martin Byford-Rew IT Services Thomas Deacon Academy

Call me. I may be able to help. Martin Byford-Rew IT Manager Thomas Deacon Academy 01733 426050

We use CMIS ePortal here (currently) to provide parents with a view of their childs data. This is accessed via an ISA server and authenticated by AD username and password. The same credentials are used within ePortal as SSO is enabled and active. If you follow the BECTA recommendations you should reach the conclusion that parental access only grants access to individual sets of details and not bulk or whole school records, therefore two factor authentication does not need to be applied.

I've discovered that I need to setup a 2008 R2 Cluster to provide access to iSCSI SAN storage and Volunes (LUNS) for hosting .vhd files for VM's created on HYPER-V resulting in high availability and live migration etc. My current configuration is 2 x DELL R410 servers with 2 (two) NICs. These are configured with one for Network Data traffic and the other for the iSCSI LAN. Do I need a third for the Heartbeat or can the Network NIC be used for this purpose.

I've discovered that I need to setup a 2008 R2 Cluster to provide access to iSCSI SAN storage and Volunes (LUNS) for hosting .vhd files for VM's created on HYPER-V resulting in high availability and live migration etc. My current configuration is 2 x DELL R410 servers with 2 (two) NICs. These are configured with one for Network Data traffic and the other for the iSCSI LAN. Do I need a third for the Heartbeat or can the Network NIC be used for this purpose.

Thank you! Time to play again on Monday with this I hope.

Thank you. An excellent article. Very useful. Do you think I would be foolish to create virtual cluster servers with direct access to the SAN using iSCSI initiators from the VM's? This would leave me with 3 three Host servers instead of 1 if I use two of them for the cluster servers?

I have a Dell Equallogic PS4000 iSCSI SAN which is devided up into multiple volumes or LUNS. One of these volumes is called 'VMs' for Virtual Machines which host the .vhd files that make up my Virtual machines on three Hyper-V Host Servers. My experience so far shows me that whilst I can access a single same volume from the three Hyper-V hosts it likely ends in curruption of files so I have resorted to creating three volumes - one for each Hyper-V Host. This appears to work fine (so far) however it brings complications with high availability and moving hosts etc. Is it possible to configure the iSCSI SAN or Host servers so that all of the vhd files reside on the same volume with simultaneous access from all, as this will make fail-over and high availability easier to achieve. Currently I need to change the access rights on the SAN to stop one server and permit another when vm's are moved between hosts. I am happy with the concept of MPIO from multiple NICs on each Host server but this does not help in the above situation.

Thank you Skyw0rca for the comments below. I'd like to pick your brains a little more if I can. Looking at these tables reveals AM and PM Roll CAll attendance data for a student in two different formats as you have said, but it appears only to show the exceptions where a student is late, absent or other. Am I misreading the table data of is there another table for LessonByLesson attendance for every occurance of an attendance submission through ePortal? Thanks Martin

We're running ePortal and recently several users are reporting that their Bitlet are disapearing when the page loads. This prevents them registering and doing events. Nothing has changed in the configuration xml files and it doesn't appear to effect all users. Has anyone else experienced the same thing? If so, did you find out what was causing it? I've currently got a call into the help desk to report the issue to. If I get a solution I'll post here. Many thanks. Martin

Thomas Deacon Academy, Peterborough. (2200 pupils ) Very local to you. Good coffee and bacon rolls . Drop in one morning before 9:30 and I'll tell you how we provide 100% of families with access to their childs data via ePortal. Martin Byford

I have the answer to this. Will need to look it out for you. DM me your details and I'll fwd to you.

I am looking for a way to create multiple .asx wrapper files from a csv file or similar. I have taken a science dvd that consists of many clips and converted it into separate short clips that are then placed onto a Windows Streaming Server and accessed from anywhere on site via the Learning Platform. This works fine when performing individual convertions, but for multiple files it is a time consuming activity creating the individual asx wrapper files. The wrapper file is the small file that is placed on the learning environment that effectively makes the content searchable and referencable on the Sharepoint Learning Platform. Example below. I would like to be able to create multiple files based upon a csv file that contains the mms address of the media and also the Title for the media. The title also becomes the filemane for each newly created asx file. Example below. Has anyone heard of such a thing of are there any coders that would like to spend a couple of hours knocking together a command line c# application, powershell or similar application to fill the neiche? Many thanks, Martin Byford-Rew IT Manager Thomas Deacon Academy Peterborough

Yes I am. Freshly d/l'd from Citrix Ver 5.5.0 (build 15119)

That's the weird thing. The CPU usage in the virtual server is low on all 4 virtual processors but the display on the XenCenter Performance console shows the flatline at 40-50%. Looking at the active processes doesn't help as the busiest one is the Idle process.

The ePortal virtual server connects to another physical server which is the SQL box so this should not apply here. Thank you anyway.

The physical servers have 16 available cores, but I'll try limiting the virtual server to a single core and see how that goes. Thanks.

No, we do not enforce any form of password policy at present. Thanks Martin

I am going to cross post this item to two forums. I am running ePortal (version 09.2 (Build 27)) through IIS on Windows Server 2003 Standard. All of these have been cleanly installed and fully patched etc. The Virtual 2003 Server has been allocated 4 cores and 2GB of memory of a new ProLiant BL460c G6 (the symptoms persist on an old ProLiant BL460c G1 server which rules out a hardware issue) Every so often the processor trace lines when monitored within XenCenter flatline at 50 - 100% causing ePortal to stop responding the only way to resolve the issue is to restart the services or restart the Virtual Server. [*] Has anyone else come accross a similar issue? [*] If so, how was it resolved? Many thanks Martin Byford-Rew IT Manager e: [email protected] t: Martin Byford-Rew (mbyrew) on Twitter

I am going to cross post this item to two forums. I am running ePortal (version 09.2 (Build 27)) through IIS on Windows Server 2003 Standard. All of these have been cleanly installed and fully patched etc. The Virtual 2003 Server has been allocated 4 cores and 2GB of memory of a new ProLiant BL460c G6 (the symptoms persist on an old ProLiant BL460c G1 server which rules out a hardware issue) Every so often the processor trace lines when monitored within XenCenter flatline at 50 - 100% causing ePortal to stop responding the only way to resolve the issue is to restart the services or restart the Virtual Server. [*] Has anyone else come accross a similar issue? [*] If so, how was it resolved? Many thanks Martin Byford-Rew IT Manager e: [email protected] t: Martin Byford-Rew (mbyrew) on Twitter