clodhopper

We've used B Tech mounts & Vision(Techmount | Vision | AV Installation ProductsVision | AV Installation Products) I have to say I like the vision ones most :-)

Have a look at DNUK (https://secure.dnuk.com/store/storage-disk.php), we have 3 of there SAN's and they just work.

Which palo alto boxes are most people going with ??

Where in Dorset are you ?? It might be that one of your local colleges could help :-/

Thanks for this, looks a good read

So I should be able to add the new 2012DC and then transfer all the FSMO roles onto it. Once this is done I can upgrade / wipe reinstall the servers to 2012 & then add them back in ??

Have a chat with the guys at ServerSource as they sell recon Dell's at really good prices

Is this update for UTM's only or will the whole firewall family get it ??

If you could agree on a spec with the other school maybe you could group together & hold servers for each other, that way you could have fast access to two servers if you could hold you "hot spare" somewhere away from the main server rooms ??

You could talk to the guys at "ServerSource" they supply B grade Dell kit but think they hold a lot of stock so might have fast turnaround in a disaster case :-/

can you not auto fill it from AD and lock it? I can look on Monday how we do it if you like

One of the problems is that a lot of the shutdown software doesn't work if the machine is at a login prompt :-(

So bad terminology still using the old terms :-) Good to know so will give it a whirl :-)

I'm looking at upgrading one of our DC's to 2012 so I can us it in a cluster with some other 2012 HyperV hosts for File serving jobs and wondered if it's OK to mix a 2008r2 AD DC Master with a 2012 AD DC Slave ?? Any thoughts or glitches I might get ?? Thanks

So how'd it go ??

We have both, Viglen USFF, Viglen Omninios & Dell USFF and they are all much of a muchness , we went with Viglen this year on cost and so far they've been really good. Being very close to Novatech we have been approached by them several times & this year they sent us a custom built AIO, it was shockingly built, hdd was held in with one screw & it was a 2.5" drive not a desktop drive, the case had no instructions how to assemble it !! All in all very disappointing so it was boxed backup ASAP and sent back.

I'd be a little careful converting a Censornet box to a virtual machine. I know a local college that tried it and couldn't manage the traffic they had. Give the Censornet guy a shout & ask them the best way to do it, I've always found them very helpful. If you look at the Censornet site they have a VMware based virtual appliance now, so they might say it's best to just backup your existing box & restore the backup to the virtual appliance. I've done this for a demo that I did to show how we use CNv4 in college , installed VMPlayer on my laptop & restored a backup from our live system to show whilst off site. Just my two pennies :-)

We've been trialling KVM on Ubuntu 9.10 & it works really well. We had some help setting it up initially from a company called DNUK who have a developed a product called OVP to make the management all web based. I can't praise them enough for there work on this and I think I'd have less hair if I hadn't used it. We also use the open source based SAN called OSS I''d recommend having a chat with them if you're thinking of using Open Source virtualisation as they run there business on it so quite important to them :-) If you'd like more info just ask :-) Open Virtualization Platform (OVP) | DNUK Open Storage Server (OSS) | DNUK

We're moving to GoogleApps in the summer for all staff & students. We currently host our own email which is filtered via webroot but we just can't afford to offer the storage & flexibility that google offers. We have signed up and they offer each account 7.5Gb's of email storage so for the 2000 users we have that we'd need a huge SAN just for email. We have had to do some work to get google's LDAP sync tool to work but it is now reading everything including MD5 passwords so the plan is to start a small scale trial with SMT/SLT to see how they get one. Why SMT/SLT first ?? if they can't break it neither will students :-)

I have a server that I'm going to start trialling KVM, it's running Ubuntu 9.0.4 & I have KVM running OK but I'm having trouble getting my brain round how Ubuntu decides which netcard gets which ip address & then how to setup bridging. The server has 6 Gb cards, two onboard(currently eth0,eth1)that I'd like to keep for management etc & a quad port card that I'd like to bridge two for virtual machines & bond two for access to our new SAN when it arrives. Currently I have configured the server with the two onboard ports (see interfaces file below) but I can't get my brain round is how it's know's what IP address to give to each card (used to go by MAC address) & how to setup the bridging & bonding bit for the quad port card, the server sees them OK in /var/log/messages as eth2,3,4,5 but they aren't configured. I have looked at loads on setting up the bridging but only on single cards not multiples so if anyone could point me in the right direction I'd be very appreciative. Thanks Brian Chivers # This file describes the network interfaces available on your system # and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5). # The loopback network interface auto lo eth0 eth1 iface lo inet loopback # The primary network interface iface eth0 inet static address 192.168.210.1 netmask 255.255.0.0 network 192.168.0.0 broadcast 192.168.255.255 gateway 192.168.0.2 # dns-* options are implemented by the resolvconf package, if installed dns-nameservers 192.168.0.1 dns-search portsmouth-college.ac.uk iface eth1 inet static address 192.168.210.2 netmask 255.255.0.0 broadcast 192.168.255.255 network 192.168.0.0

I've been on a Firebrand training camp (Near chipping norton) when I did my Linux LPI training. It was hard work but very good for me as there are too many distractions at home, a 2 yr old being one of them :-) They did pack a lot in the 7 days & they were long days, start at 8.30, finish @ 6.30 then a couple of chapters to read for the next day. I think I'd do it again if I could but is expensive

Thanks for all the pointers, I'll have a look at the SUN stuff

I was thinking around 5 Tb's What I'm think about it for is things like removing local storage for our Samba server that hold our student / staff personal space, things like that. We're also starting to look at virtualisation with HyperV so it would be good to use it to hold the virtual machines so we can do things like live migration when W2k8 R2 is released. Brian

What sort of hardware you using, old workstation or something special ??

Is anyone using OpenFiler in anger ?? I'm starting to look around at SAN's for our college as storage is getting a problem & I've looked at the big boys like EMC, Hitachi & Equalogic / Dell but they are soooooo expensive. I realise that these solutions are very powerful but looking at OpenFiler I think it'll do everything I want such as iSCSI etc. If you are using it in anger what hardware are you running it on & what jobs is it doing ?? Thanks Brian