spc-rocket

Hi, I think its because so they don't break the contract more than anything else. These guys are pretty cleaver but they need to get trained up with RM way of doing things that all. Daft but there you go. Ash.

You should be able to do this. Use different host headers on the webserver for different websites. its pretty easy to do this IIS. Ash.

Yeah that's whay i've read as well. However not sure if that ratio could be matched so realistically it should be around 600-670Gb i think. Ash.

Hi Guys, Many thanks for the updates, yes its true that RM is a pain sometimes and we are looking at moving away from them. Give the time considerations at this point we can't do this just yet. The strange thing is that RM has a engineer that comes out and does the same thing as you - images the server (i think sector by sector) and restores the image to another hardware be it different. Now there are tools that will do this i.e. Acronis True Image and Symantec BackupExec System Recovery. I've been talking to our LEA team about this and they are working with RM to get trained so they can do the migrations. Now their cost is no where near the cost of what RM are quoting me on. I also suggested to them that if they purchase one of the above products and try it they can use the software and do the migrations at various schools and recoup the license once the migration is completed. Looking at all the docs of the two products it does state that it can be used for hardware migrations and does support DC migration (moving to different hardware) as well which is why it shouldn't be that difficult to do this. I do appreciate the different ways to do this and as someone else said in another post that this forum provides many answers and not just one. Good stuff! Ashok.

I would look at SAN (Storage Area Network) which allows for greater flexibility with storage allocation. If you do find that more storage is require then you can upgrade the san or add more disk to increate the overall storage. I guess with this you can start off with say giving each user 300-400mb space to see how much they use. If they require more then you can allocate more space and add more disks to san as i said. This will give you the chance to test out how much disk space is actually used rather than assuming how much they are going to use. SANs (espcially ISCSI) are becomming cheaper and a lot of vendors offers SANs that uses iSCSI i.e. Dell, HP, SimpleSAN etc. For the backup you can use autoloaders with LTO-3 Tapes which holds about 400Gb uncompressed! don't know how much you get with the compression probably 650Gb or maybe 700Gb. Have a look at the Dell Autoloader don't know the model but i think it has two magazines each allowing for upto 8 catridges. The educations discounts brings the prices to a reasonable level, HTH, Ashok.

Hi Guys, Thanks for more input, unfortunately RM doesn't support moving to virual machine and moving the FSMO roles as it voids our support contract. Bummer! I know lots of people have suggested ghost the DC and then retore it to different hardware let it boot up and also BSOD. Then use the windows server CD to do an repair to install the mass storage drivers. I'm not sure about this and the last thing i want to do is to mess everything up. I don't mind paying £300 for specialist software i.e. Acronis True image or Symantec BackupExec System Recovery (prev. Symantec LiveState) to do this. Apparently i'm told that RM uses the BackupExec System Recovery (LiveState) to the migrations so here's me thinking why should i pay them £2600 per server to do the migrations when i can do it. Ashok.

That's not entirely true as you can get the utilities which are usually from the RAID controller's manufactur which allows you to add an extra drive to an existing array. There are two ways to do this, 1) when the system is up, i think you use the utility in windows or other OSs or other is to shut the server down and use the BIOS utility to do this. These utilities are installed on our server and work from both Windows and BIOS. Ashok.

I'm going to trial the acronis true image software and test it on a non-critical server and see what happens. This should give me an idea of what gets migrated and what falls over. The problem with the cost i see is that the software they use doesn't cost that much - I think they use Symantec LiveState (now called Backup Exec Server Recovery or something) which only cost arounf £370 approx. Its the cost of the person comming on site and his/her travelling cost etc that makes up the cost, that what they reckon - RM. Ashok.

Hi guys, Thanks for the replies. The problem is that these server are RM server and obvisouly commissioned by them. They have software that images the server and then they restore this to new hardware and everything is intact as when the image is taken so no need to have new server names etc. The cost £2500 per server that does not include the cost of the new hardware - what a rip off!!!!! Ash.

Hello all, We are looking to migrate two of our DCs currently running Windows 2000 Server to new hardware. I'm looking for something easy as possible and have looked at one solution but not sure on how to go about doing it. The product i looked at is Acronis True Image 9.1 for Windows Server and the Universal Restore option. According to their documentation it allows you to restore to different hardware. Just wondering if anyone has used this product before and if so could provide any pointers/starting off point. TIA, Ash.

Hi, I agree with Geoff, 802.1x is ideal for this and i think its developed for situations like this. Ashok.

Someone better tell CLEO then. We're using PPTP here in Cumbria/Lancashire for our VPN remote access solution because apparently it's 'more secure' than IPSec.... I think its the combination of L2TP/IPSEC that is more secure. Window 2000 + has the client built in. Ashok.

Hi, Any errors in the event viewer. Does the application or system error have anthing with userenv and specifically GPO Branding etc? Ashok.

Thanks Geoff, I wasn't obviously looking in the right place Ash.

Hi Guys, I've just installed NINO on a windows xp PC and it installed correctly. Following the instructions to configure everything i am being prompted for an username and password. I can't seem to find the default username or password in the documentation. Any thoughts? Ashok.

Hi, We got both sims.net and FMS working on TS. Mind you this is for remote access at the moment for the SLT members and there is only one person using this. We did have initial FMS problems but they are now resolved by sorting out permissions and the ugly 16bit application issues. I don't know how sims.net will run when 4-5 people try to use it at the same time via TS. Will be upgrading the server soon so it has plenty of RAM. Ash.

For mini GBICs have a look around at Hardware.com. Pretty good range of switches used and new ones and always handy for the gbics and last minute odd purchases. Ash.

Hi, We have used HS Dataline, based on Birmingham and found them to be excellent!. They are very experienced and have worked for the likes of BBC, MOD etc. http://www.hsdataline.co.uk HTH, Ashok.

Hi Geoff, I thought when you restore the disk image it does give you an option to specify the partion sizes. It automatically fills in the partition sizes of the PC where the image was created but you can then enter a bigger partion size if the target disk is bigger. This is supported on Ghost 2003, haven't used other ghost version so i don't know if they do. HTH, Ashok.

Thanks for the clarification guys. Ash.

Geoff, Just looked at NINO. I'm presuming that i install this and will install Perl, PHP, Apache and MySQL. Can i then use the nagios package to run nagios. Just trying to figure out where to put the extracted nagios files after the NINO is installed or is NINO with everything integrated inc. Nagios? Thanks! Ash.

That's great Geoff, Thanks! Ash.

Geoff, Got any destuctions for the setup you reffering to above. Ash.

Hi Guys, Thanks for the information. @Ric @Geoff I'll check out the VMwave and also have a look at getting the PHP and Perl on one of the machines. At the moment we are using "The Dude" The Dude which is quite good but doesn't do all the things we need it to do. Ashok.

Hi Ric, Looks very good and have heard lots of postive things about Nagios. Shame its not available for Windows platform. Ash.