CHiLL

We do! Every time! I've never had a more persistent account manager.

The majority of our printers are on a lease contract, which includes the toners. So our ordering of replacement inks/toners is extremely low as we don't have many non-contract printers. When we do buy, we used to use IJT (InkJets and Toners)/MakeITGreen. Their prices were always good and I can't remember the last time we had an issue with a toner/ink from them. However our account manager is extremely persistent and regularly calls asking if we need to buy anything...despite being told about our current printing solution and lack of purchasing. They call so frequently and don't get the massage that it's put us off buying from them and would look elsewhere. They haven't actually called much recently, but we'd probably go with IDNS in future, should we need to buy any...I don't want to remind our account manager that we exist...

Decent little city car, can't really knock the choice!

So far so good, performance has generally been very good using forward incremental instead of reverse. I have some questions about the synthetic full backups: 1) If I copy the synthetic .vbk and the metadata .vbm file to off-site/cloud storage...are they enough to use as disaster recovery? 2) How do synthetic full backups vary from active full backups? Synthetic full backups cannot be scheduled on a months basis, which I'd prefer. Instead they can only be run on a daily or weekly basis. Edit: So from my research, for a synthetic full, the .vbk file is built on the SAN by using existing backup files in the chain (so mounting the VMs and no network transfer). An active full backup would mount the VM and perform a full backup over the network. So my first question still stands - can I copy off this synthetic full backup file and recover the server fully from it?

Eh! I'll have less of that! My green Mazda 2 Tamura is a great car, even for guys! In all seriousness, Mazda have really upped their game and the newer cars look more aggressive than my model, and they're generally well equipped in terms of features and gadgets. If you go for a large dealership and they have one in a far away branch, you can often get it shipped down if you're serious about it. Mine came from the Stirling branch of Arnold Clark to St Helens, so a fair distance! I had already moved to Birmingham by that point and I believe I could still take it to the local Birmingham branch, had it developed a fault within their limited warranty period.

Deciding on a new car is always a difficult decison because you'll get all sorts of advice (good and bad) about people's preferences and manufacturers to avoid. Since your OH already has a Mini, I take it that's the preferred size of vehicle, a supermini? 1) I wouldn't mention the crack and no repocusions will come back on you. Once the vehicle is sold, it's then their responsibility, regardless. That's why private trades/auctions/eBay, etc are all so risky. The seller doesn't have to say anything (unless it's been written off and repaired) and it's at the buyer's risk. 2) Have you considered Mazda? Their little Mazda 2 is a great car, or at least it has been for me. I have a 2010 Mazda 2, which I bought in 2013 with <12k miles on the clock for £6000. I have no reason to get rid of it and I've only had to replace the usuals, like break discs/pads, springs/shocks. Maybe take a look at the newer Mazda 2 models as you may find one within your price range and they're also in your preference of Japanese manufacturers. 3) I think it depends on when and where you go. The larger sales places like Arnold Clark would be able to process everything faster, but they'll likely want to vallet the vehicle before you drive it away, which would prevent you from driving it away that day. The other thing that can slow down a purchase of a vehicle is the taxing. I had issues where there was a paperwork mixup and by the time it was sorted, it was Saturday afternoon and the car couldn't be taxed until Monday morning because they had to go to the Post Office. (That might have changed now because taxing can be done online) 4) A sales person will try to sell you everything under the sun. If it's not in writing, don't count on it. Things I tend to look out for are scratches/scuffs and misaligned body panels, where they don't meet where they should...that indicates it's been involved in something. They'll have likely cleaned up the engine bay, which would remove any signs of oil leaks in the area so you can't really check that. Maybe check for uneven wear on the tyres? These places are usually good at hiding potential issues putting buyers off. ALso, I'd recommend going during daylight, to get a good look at the vehicle, especially with later opening times and earlier sunsets now we're approaching winter. Lastly, check that all optional extras are working. My air-con doesn't work because the radiator is smashed to bits at the front. I didn't realise at the time and by the time I did, it was out of it's 3 month warranty period. My ex bought a new car that had a USB socket for connecting a phone to listen to music with and didn't realise the USB port was mangled. She caught it in-time and had to fight with the garage to get them to repair it.

When we do charge, we charge at cost of the item and can provide the invoice if pricing is questioned.

I used WMI filters back in 2016 when testing Windows 10 alongside Windows 8.1. Worked perfectly. Though I believe Microsoft have ditched support for mandatory and roaming profiles on Windows 10. Whilst they can still be used, I don't think they work quite like they used to.

We have no perfmance issues and I have all the apps still in and push the StartLayout file to about 400 machines.

I changed the MTU yesterday to 9000, however that hasn't made a difference to the performance. I converted one of my jobs from reverse incremental to forward incremental and the speed for that one job has gone from 5MB/s on Tuesday night's backup to 49MB/s at last night's backup (speeds reported in the job summary section in the VEEAM console). The bottleneck also changed from Target to Proxy. Good signs. We use a Robocopy/RClone script on a schedule to copy the .vbk and .vbm reverse incremental backup files to our cloud storage. Forward incremental creates a .vbk and subesquent .vib files and the synthetic full also creates a .vbk file from what I understand. How do I get the script to pick up only the synthetic full? At the moment we just use a wildcard for .vbk and .vbm files. We don't want the script to unnecessarily copy both .vbk files, only the synthetic full.

Use a custom StartLayout, that way you don't have to remove apps from the image. However the apps will still appear in the Start Menu, but you can use AppLocker to prevent users from running them.

Very true. I will change it today if I can and see what the backup results are tomorrow. Though VEEAM is now health-checking our 2TB staff server backup, which may take some time...so maybe I'll have to make the change tomorrow instead!

We've been using reverse incremetal backups for years now and the processing rate is much slower as it performs 3 I/O operations per data block compared to Forward Incremental's 1 I/O per data block. The reason we use reverse incremental is because the latest backup file is the full backup, which can easily be copied off, along with the metadata file to somewhere else, including cloud locations. So I don't need to copy the incremental files as well. My understanding is that if I wanted to store copies of the forward incremental data of say last night, I'd have to copy the earliest full backup file and all subsequent incremental files as well to my other/cloud storage. Is that correct? Because that's ultimately much more data than copying the reverse backup file. I'm trying to weigh up on-site backup performance vs ease of off-site backup/time. Note: We use scripts/rclone to copy the data from our on-site repository to cloud locations, so we don't use any VEEAM features to do it.

Our mapped printers are something like this: \\printserver.local\IT1 Printer So they do contain a space and they do map, just not consistently. I've done testing on whether the spaces make a difference - they do not. The same mapping issues occur with or without spaces in the printer name.

The VM host (10GbE) and QNAP (4GbE trunked) are both connected into our HP ProCurve 5406zl core switch, which does apparently support jumbo frames. However to enable it, it's enabled on the VLAN the devices are on. They're both on the same VLAN, but it's also the same VLAN as all our other server infrastructure. Is enabling jumbo frames on that VLAN going to use issues with other services/servers that aren't configured for jumbo frames? Edit: After connecting to the switch via PuTTY, it looks like Jumbo frames is already enabled on that VLAN.

Jumbo Frame isn't a yes/no option, it's just a value box. It's currently set at 1500.

I can only do sequential read and read IOPS tests and they look good - so the issue must be with either the QNAP configuration or network? I doesn't seem to be VEEAM as a file copy [ATTACH=CONFIG]55352[/ATTACH] Secondly, a Windows file copy from the VEEAM VM server to the mapped QNAP drive (where VEEAM backs up to) has transfers at 50-60MB/s: [ATTACH=CONFIG]55353[/ATTACH] Maybe the transfer speed applicaiton I was using is crap. I'm going to use DiskSpd, which is recommended by VEEAM for testing.

Ah, nevermind then! I have absolutely no idea why it's going so slow and I don't where to start and as far as I can tell, it's configured correctly. Checking the transport mode within VEEAM, it's configured as Virtual Appliance, which I presume is correct as they're VMs on ESXi hosts. I'm considering getting a third party support company to take a look (we have a points contract we need to use up anyway).

I've just started Jessica Jones Season 3. It's the last of the Marvel shows I have to watch and thought I may as well get it out of the way. I loved Season 1, 2 was OK and 3 just seems a bit meh, a bit too focused on Trish for my liking.

Looks like our QNAP TVS-1271U-RP has two mSATA slots on the motherboard that can be used for SSD caching. That would solve the issue of having to shift drives around. Would I need to utilise both slots? What capacity drives would I need? Our largest backup file is approximately 2TB and we are using approximately 18TB of storage in total on the QNAP.

I did see that, though only slots 1,2,3,4 are capable of using an SSD as a cache drive according to QNAPs documentation. All those slots are currently in use. I do have a couple of spare slots at drive bays 11,12, but I'd have to do some drive bay swapping. How does this work? I know the drives are hot-swappable. Can I remove a drive from bay 1 and move it to bay 12? Or would that trigger a RAID rebuild? Also, what capacity of SSD would be suitable? I have a spare 120GB Kingston A400 drive in the office. Would that be sufficient? Or would I need a higher capacity or more of them. Our QNAP has 8GB of RAM.

Hm, I can't find anything along those lines in the QNAP settings. Our backups are configured as reverse incremental (which I understand are much slower than standard incremental, but not as slow as we're seeing!). The reason for this is because it means that the latest backup file is the full backup. So we only need to copy that and the metadata file to offline or cloud storage, rather than copying the full backup, metadata and all subsequent incremental files.

We use a QNAP TVS-1271U-RP as our on-site backup storage. It currently has 11x 3TB Seagate ST3000VN0001 NAS HDDs (7,200RPM) drives in a RAID5 configuration with a CIFS share and 4x GbE ports trunked to a 4GbE connection. The access speeds have always been dire when VEEAM backs up to it and it is currently running between 3-10MB/s and reports the bottleneck as the target (QNAP). In comparison, I did 5 file write speed tests on the QNAP and our HP MSA used for our production data (7,200RPM MDL drives). The average results were: QNAP Write: 12.646MB/s QNAP Read: 65.142MB/s MSA Write: 53.792MB/s MSA Read: 156.996MB/s The disk health reports Good in the QNAP console. I cannot figure out why it's so bad.

We are a secondary of about 650 students and on a 200Mb Up/Down over a 1Gb pipe. For us, that seems fine, I don't think we max it out that often.

But wouldn't that mean it wouldn't output to a secondary display - which is does?