mitchell1981

Thanks. I've had a look and this looks to be exactly what I need. Found a good guide here: Clustering and High Availability : Deploying Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) in Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clustering Of course setting it up is going to be tricky on a live system. Perhaps I'll wait until the next holiday! If anyone has tried this already please share your experiences. Thanks.

Just wanted to ask about virtual server system design when using a SAN. I have five physical servers connected to a SAN box. The physical servers boot from their own hard disks but the virtual servers will run from the SAN. I want to run about three virtual machines on each physical server. What is the best way to configure this? If I take one server as an example. I want to set up a file server so it will need two volumes. A system volume and a studentdata volume. So the options appear to be: 1) Create one volume on the SAN and attach it to the physical server. Then create two VHDs on the volume, one for the system disk and one for the data disk, and allocate them to the virtual machine. 2) Create two volumes on the SAN and put a VHD file on each volume, one for the system disk and one for the data disk and attach them to the physical server, then allocate them to the virtual machine. 3) Create two volumes on the SAN, use a VHD for the system disk, attached to the phsical server. The data volume would be attached directly to the virtual machine and not use a VHD file at all. Anyone know which is the approved method or am I thinking completely along the wrong lines? I'm also concerned that with the release of the new version of Hyper-V and the ability to live-migrate servers, it is important that all physical servers can have access to all volumes on the SAN, but I don't see how this is possible with any of these configurations! Finally if anyone knows of a good guide to network design using virtual servers then that would be great.

We are looking for a new ICT technician to do ICT support work, help out in the classroom and administer our new VLE. If you are interested then here is some more info: Application Form Job Details School Website Thank you for your interest.

Can I ask how, people plan to test Windows 7 without having to set up 25 machines? I would like to test it on a couple of machines in a classroom before going for a whole classroom, but as soon as I join them to the domain, they immediately lose their 30 day grace period and start popping up all sorts of warnings about my software not being genuine. My KMS server is all set up and working, but I don't really want to install on 25 machines yet. What are others doing?

It is, but I didn't realise that it would delete members who are already in the group. This is my current configuration: http://www.mascalls.kent.sch.uk/users.jpg If I remove this policy completely will domain admins still have local admin rights over machines? Thanks.

Hi All, Is it normal that when you join a computer to a domain, local accounts are suddenly no longer in the adminstrator group, and therefore lose their admin rights? This is causing us a few problems and I'm sure it never used to happen. The main local 'Administrator' account stays as an administrator account, but any other accounts that we have created seem to become standard accounts as soon as we join to the domain. Any ideas how to stop this happening? Thanks.

Yes, it was quotas! Should have realised as it was exactly 500mb. Thanks. All sorted now.

Can anyone help me with a weird problem. Basically the screen shot shows the properties of the same disk. The one on the right is correct and accessed through Disk Management, the left one accessed through My Computer. My Computer sees the disk as 500mb with 21mb free! Workstations on the network see the correct statistics, so it is not an immediate problem, but if I try and copy any files directly on the server it keeps telling me I am out of disk space! Very annoying. I've run a scan disk, and no reported problems. I've tried taking the volume on and offline, no effect. Some background info. Recently upgraded server to Server 2008 R2. The server is a virtual server running on Hyper V. The disk is actually a SAN volume accessed via iSCSI. It is a dynamic disk. http://www.mascalls.kent.sch.uk/diskspace.jpg

Thanks that makes it all a bit clearer. Fortunately that is more or less what I have done. Might start experimenting with a Windows 7 client then!

Hi, I've been messing around with KMS and I've set up 6 servers on Windows Server 2008 R2 using the appropriate KMS key from MVLS. I also have a key for Windows 7 on MVLS, but when I go to install the key into the KMS server it suggests that the exisiting key will be replaced. If this is the case how can I install both keys on the server or do I not need to? Perhaps I need to run a seperate server for Windows 7?

You will need to have a VNC application installed as well to view the clients. The one supplied with Lanview was TightVNC. It needs to be allocated to every client. The MST website used to host the MSI file for this, but obviously that isn't available anymore. Perhaps if anyone still has this then they could make it available. I have a copy but I'm not at work for a couple of weeks. Tom.

Thanks for the suggestion. Will check it out with the LA and report back! Tom.

Hi All, Having a bizarre problem with OWA at the moment. We have just installed an ISA server and I thought I had managed to successfully connect OWA through it. All was working well until everyone went home. The next day I got reports that everyone who was logging in was getting other users mailboxes up instead of their own! More research showed that they were seeing the mailbox of the previous person to log in. This affect only happened to external users connecting though the ISA server. Users on the LAN were ok. Finally I found that turning off 'HTTP Keep Alives' on the Exchange server solved the problem. However, the performance of OWA with this option off is dreadful and we have been getting a lot of complaints. Does anyone else have OWA running through an ISA server and do you have 'HTTP Keep Alives' turned on? Any thoughts on why I might be getting the initial problem would be appreciated. I can only assume that the Exchange server sees all the requests as coming from the same computer (the ISA server) and therefore serves a cached page instead of a new logon screen. This would be normal behaviour, like when a user closes their browser and quickly reopens it again, there is no need to log back in. However, this obviously should not be the case when using an ISA server! We are using ISA server 2006 and Exchange 2003. The attached screenshot shows what a user gets when they visit the OWA page, before they even attempt to log in. The mailbox on the right is that of the previous user. Thank you for any help you can give me. Tom.

Yes you're probably right. Might have a play with the R2 beta then, although I expect that the group policies are probably one of the last things they work on.

Server 2008. All up to date. I did a search for Libraries and Libray in group policy and the only option I can find is one to turn them off completely. I may try that. It seems weird that there are no more detailed controls for something that is a major new feature of Windows 7. Perhaps I'm missing something.

Ok, so I know I'm getting ahead of myself here, but I wanted to set up a test network machine running Windows 7 so that I am prepared for it. Everything works great apart from the fact that the documents shortcut on the start menu points to the Libraries, rather than directly at the documents folder. This wouldn't be a problem except that the libraries are pointing at the C: Drive User folders rather than my folder redirections on the server. Anyone experimented with the Libraries stuff on a network yet? Are there any ways to control it with group policy and do I need a Windows 7 admin station to see those policies?

Hi All, We've been having all sorts of problems with IE on our network recently. Mainly to do with our VLE constantly crashing and I think I've now tried almost everything I can think of to fix it. I noticed that Google Chrome was much faster and suffered no crashes when I tested it, so I was wondering, has anyone tried Google Chrome in a network environment yet? My main concerns are: Is it easy to deploy, via group policy or similar? Are there any ADM/ADMX files that can be used to lock it down so that proxy settings etc.. can't be removed? Thanks for any advice you can give me. Tom Mitchell Network Manager Mascalls School

Thanks for the suggestion. I will try changing the channels and see what happens. We are using Zero configuration, but switched to the netgear software just to see what it was doing.

I was wondering if anyone could shed any light on a strange problem we are having. Most of our wireless network consists of Netgear WG602v2 access points. These have been very unreliable so I've started to replace them with HP Procurve 420 access points. So far I have replaced two. Most of our laptops work fine with this arrangement. However, we have a number of older laptops which use netgear wireless PCMCIA cards (WG511) to connect to the network. For some reason they always want to connect to the new HP Procurve access points, even when they are in another building! This screenshot shows the situation quite well. The highlighted access point is the one in the same room which has a strong signal, yet the card chooses to ignore it and connect to the Procurve access point (A4-BD). http://www.mascalls.kent.sch.uk/wifi.jpg If the new access points are switched off then the laptops connect to the strongest signal again, as they are supposed to do! Anyone got any ideas? The HP Procurve 420 has a lot of settings that I don't understand, but I think I've got it set up correctly.

Just a quick question that I expect someone will know the answer to straight away. Our domain is currently running at the 'Windows 2000 native' functional level. I've just bought a couple of new domain controllers running Server 2008 and I want to raise the level accordingly. It is my understanding that all domain controllers must be running server 2008 in order to raise the level, which they now are. I just want to know if an Exchange server has any affect on this? Our Exchange server still runs Windows 2000. Does exchange actually run an active directory, or does it just link to one on another server? Thanks.

Is this correct and what are the restrictions? I was planning to put in an 2008 server but the price of the new CALs was putting me off! Anyone have any more information on this? Thanks.

I forgot to say that our students all use Web-Outlook, so I'm not sure if the Microsoft article would work in this case. I will look into it though. Thanks for the suggestion.

I've recently done a purge on our system to remove as many Flash games as possible. I would like to block .swf files completely but they are required by our ICT department teaching Flash! The only place the games now remain is in users exchange mailboxes. Some of these e-mails have up to 100 different games attached! I plan to wipe all student mailboxes over the holiday which should help the situation, however, I know that they will simply e-mail the games back in again! Can I stop Exchange from allowing swf attachments? I don't want to block all attachments, just swf files.

Hi all, Just a small problem that we've been having with wallpaper. We set student wallpaper using a GPO which points to a jpg on a network share. This works fine, but seems to have the affect of making our icons look rubbish. They have rough edges and the text is blocked out, windows 98 style. http://www.mascalls.kent.sch.uk/active.jpg This seems to be caused by Active Desktop. I thought I would be able to turn off Active Desktop by switching to using BMPs, but this doesn't seem to work either. Turning off the Active Desktop just stops all GPO wallpaper from working at all. Does anyone know a way around this? Basically I want to have centrally managed wallpaper but not have to use Active Desktop at all. Thanks!

Thanks will have a look at the Apple thing! Webman, those computer desks with the recessed keyboard shelf look good. Do you have any idea where they came from or how much they cost? Thanks.