ozydave

Ahhhhhhhh. Thanks for the link Microsoft Licensing - as clear as mud

Hi I’m going to get a new server soon and thought I would get server 2008 standard to run on it. It will be a domain controller. Our other servers are 2003 standard. I’m confused about the licensing. Do I need to get different ‘cals’ or can I just the buy 2008 install it and be up and running? Any help with licensing would be great Cheers

Promoted the backup domain controller and demoted the other. The server with the active directory error has had AD removed and restored. The old PDC still has the RAID error. Management software still says the logical drive is degraded. I have tried replacing the suspect drive with a new one. As soon as I pull it the suspect disk the server crashes. With the new drive in place the server will not boot, saying no RAID installed. Put the old suspect drive back in and the server start normally. The suspect drive has a constant green light on. The other drives have flashing green lights. I put a additional new drive in (so that now makes 5 disks) and created a hot spare out of it. I rebooted the server which started normally. I was hoping the RAID with now use the hot spare, it doesn’t. Questions. I think that the constant green light on the suspect drive means the disk is online but inactive. I could initialize the drive but will that delete the data in the whole array or just that disk? The suspect drive is the first in the array. Does the controller write boot info to this drive? That’s the only reason I can think off why I cant hotswap. Can I add another disk and make that part of the array? Will this delete data in the whole array? It will be 5 disks in the array including the suspect disk. When the array has finished rebuilding could this latest disk be removed and placed in the suspect drive slot? I am new to RAID so go easy Cheers

ProLiant ML150 G2 – Windows 2003 standard Raid Controller adaptec 2610sa with 4 160gb drives in raid 5 config HP Storage Manager Agent reported a failed drive. I checked the server and saw a constant amber light on the drive. (the first one in the array at the bottom). Then the server shut down. I pulled the drive and replaced it with a 250gb one (new). Restarted the server. During the start up no raid was found, it then said that the bios was not installed and went into a network boot. I shut down the server, put the old drive back in (I had put the suspect drive into another HP server and it seemed to work fine) I again restarted the server. This time the raid was found but it came up on the screen “drive is missing or degraded”. The restart got and far as “windows is starting “. It then came up with an error “Lsass.exe – system error security accounts manager initialization failed because of the following: directory services cannot start. Error status 0x00002e1. Please click OK to shut down this system and reboot into directory services restore mode, check the event log for more detailed information” Another normal restart – the above error still came up but there was another window in the background saying “active directory is rebuilding indices” but seemed to stay on this Another restart but this time into directory services restore mode. The server is now running in this mode. The light on the suspect drive is now a constant green, the other drives are flashing green. The HP storage manager shows the RAID controller and it says all drives in the array are ‘optimal’. But is says that the logical drive is degraded. While in this restore mode I thought I would hot swap the suspect drive and allow the raid to rebuild. As soon as I pulled the first drive in the array the server went into a blue screen and shut down. Again put the suspect drive back in and again the server is running in directory services mode. Why can’t I just swap the first drive in the array? Is active directory broken? Any help would be great?

We have a 2003 domain with xp clients, roaming profiles for all. The students have a redirected start menu so they only get what I want them to get. The problem is that once a student logs in and clicks the start menu, it takes an age for the menu to pop up. It has been slow ever since I have started working here, just would like to get it sorted now. I have moved the redirected menu form the domain controller, to another server which is TS and idle during the day, also moved it to another server as a final check. All had no improvement in the situation. I have tried it after school when no one is around also Any ideas would be great. Cheers

What is symlink? Is it a moodle module I cannot install any modules myself. Cheers Dave

The scheduled backup are good but they only store the backup within the course. Does that make sense? So course A has a scheduled backup that stores the backup with course A. If course A was deleted then the backups are deleted. I am then back to the LEA restoring the entire database. Not the best solution. I now you can set the scheduled backup path but again the LEA will not give me a path to backup to Cheers

We have a Moodle VLE setup and is starting to become more widely used. It is hosted by our LEA (Atomwide). Who are pushing the VLE thing! I am concerned about the backups. As it grows in popularity more students are required to submit their course work. As this course work goes towards the final exam marks it needs to kept in case of appeals. So it’s not only for the time they can appeal it is also during the years running up to the marking for the exams, possibly 3 years or more. The problem I see coming is the LEA only do a full database backup and only keep two weeks worth. 1. Should a course be deleted by mistake and not noticed for 2 ½ weeks that course is lost forever and all the course work submissions. 2. If the course is deleted and noticed within the 2 weeks the LEA can only do a full a full restore on the VLE, which will delete all submissions in all the other courses. Yes we can ask teachers / course creators to do regular backups of there own courses and download them to a local drive but this will get forgotten or just not done. (Teacher being teaches and all) I know that you can have an AUP stating that students are responsible for keeping copies of all work submitted, but it will still come back to the school keeping records. I do not fancy going into 70 odd courses creating a backup and then downloading them to a local drive I have asked the LEA to allow me to download one of there backups once a week which I could then restore to a server running moodle which I could then extract the needed course/ user data, but they did not go for that. How does anybody else handle the backups? Does anybody else have a helpful LEA. The LEA contract the services of Atomwide to provide schools with Internet and other services so in effect they are working for the school so should try to help us But……

Hi Has anybody see this error before! "Timetable has not been setup for nay of the days between the date range" It happens in take register. Selecting ‘sessions and lessons’. Weird thing is that if the group type is set to ‘Individual students’ it does not appear, not select reg. group and the error appears. The attendance officer pointed this to me. I have done the May08 upgrade, but it was happening before this. Any offers or ideas? Cheers Ozydave

A few teachers have asked about having the iPlayer installed so started testing on my machine and it work fine until I try to download for later playback. I could not get to work so checked with our LEA and guess what they block the downloads, they say for security reasons. I’m in the BucksGfl authority area. Any one else been blocked?? A great resource of educational material blocked by the local education authority. Great!!!! Cheers All

Our Web filter is supplied by the local authority and the only access I can get to it is to block a URL. There is a possibility to get more functions form it such as filtering but they will not give access until I go on a web filtering Great but there are no courses planned in the near future

Correct Forum? Our school has web based email system which is run by our local authority (they setup, host all the email accounts) All staff can access their email either through a web interface (home / school) or use POP/IMAP. Students can only use the web interface (school or Home). I have just found out that the local authority does not filter out EXE files. So a student can send him/her self an EXE file from home and then login into their email at school and run them. We have a software restriction policy set up (and it works) for stopping the students from running EXE’s from USB drives or on the network. We have SOPHOS on the network which is how I track it down I must be missing something, how can I stop them from running exe’s from email attachments Hope this makes sence Any help would be great Dave

Thanks for all the replys My thought was to create a mirror while is working fine, once it had completed i was thinking of removing the hard drive thus breaking the mirror. I was hopeing that i would be left with a working copy which i could restore if needed.

What am I trying to achieve is basically a backup of the windows partition, so if windows becomes corrupt then a I have backup of a working windows partition which I could restore. I know I could make a ghost image of the partition but that could be problematic with a hardware raid Just looking for an easer solution

HI I have a Proliant ML150G2 with 4 160Gb drives in a hardware raid 5. (it is our main domain controller – we do have a backup domain controller) The array have been split into 3 so the c (system) partition is part of the raid 5. Not ideal I know, it was already setup when I got here. I want to get a mirror of the system partition (c Drive). What is the best way? Can I just add another dive and then use windows disk manager to mirror c: Will it work if I attach an external hard drive and then use windows disk manager to mirror c: Fairly new to RAID so not sure what the best method is – I don’t want to start from scratch Many Thnaks

Hi just setup the onscreen testing. I contact the support line to find out what kind of network resources it has when testing 60 students. They could not answer me. Any of you guys know what impact the testing has on the network (if any). Thanks Dave

Any have any experience of creating an image of the C drive on a RAID 5 server? I’m thinking of using Norton Ghost, will this do the job? I have read lost of posts about ghosting PC across the network and the like, but I’m happy with how we do it, we use an RIS image . I just want a quick way to get our Domain controller back if C Drive becomes corrupt. Any thoughts

Many thanks for all the replies. You have answered my main concern about any legal issues. BTW You guys from Australia, I hope to move down there again in 3 years time, just got to wait for my little one to grow up a little. Came back from Perth (November last year) beautiful place but to many English (even though I am one). We love and lived in Coogee Sydney. Hope to get back there. Thanks again

Not sure what forum to post this in Is there any law or could anybody recommend how long schools need to keep the work of ex students. I only refereeing to the work that students have in their user areas held on the servers. I not interested in any work that has been given to teachers (paper copies). The reason is that our backup space is running low. Any ideas or suggestions Ozydave

Grommit We have obviously got the teachers to sign that they will comply with the data protection act. The teachers have to bear the responsibility for the safety of the data, both in school and at home. At school the data is available so what is stop a teacher or any other member of staff coping / printing information and taking it home. I agree that many times I have walked into a classroom and found the teacher has let him/her self logged on. All you can do I tell them of the importance of data protection again. If there is something that enables teacher to do their job in a way that suits them, i.e. doing reports at home rather than sitting at school etc then that has to be a good thing. As regards downloading stuff from the server while working remotely, that is stopped. We have MS office running on the TS so they can open documents and work on them and resave but not copy to their computer at home. (In fact the only software that will run is SIMS and MS Office. Everything else has been stopped by the software restriction policy. The start menu has been redirected so the only icons they see are SIMS and Office) If your school is concerned about the data falling into the wrong hands, do you allow the use of USB Flash drives and printers? Regards Ozydave

Hi Just found your post on accessing sims at home. We have setup TS running sims. Not that difficult. Our TS server is not the newest. It’s an old dell power edge (don’t think they make them any more). It does have two processers and 2GB of memory. You do have to buy TS CALS (I think they were £13 or something like that) and have another server acting as the TS licensing server. We have set it up so 20 staff can access sims remotely. All seems to be working fine. If the need arises we can just get more CALS to allow more access. The main problem was getting our County council to setup a sslvpn. So to access sims remotely the teacher connect using the SSLVPN connection which takes them to the school network. They then can run a remote desktop connection (mstsc with the ip address) or a remote web connection (tsweb – http://server ip address/tsweb). The TS server needs to be put in its own OU in Active Directory. You can then apply the TS loopback group policy to it. You can then lock down the server as much as you wish. We stop them doing anything apart from running sims and MS office. When they log on we have given them access to the personal files and shared areas on the network. Does any of this make sence? Let me know if you need more info, I’ll do my best to help

Downloaded the 'logonrecorder.zip' file this morning. Works great. Easy to set up and use. Many thanks to the author Dave

We have a 2003 server domain and XP Pro clients. We use roaming profiles and redirect the student’s home folder to H: \\servername1\students$\username The staff are also redirected to H: \\servername1\staff$\username How can I limit the size of the students home area? I can I place a limit H:\ drive? I have tried to enforce disk quotas on the server to limit students but it will not work for some reason. For one student the quota reports the user has 1.5gb but when I check the actual folder the user has 3.5gb. I did set the enforce limit to above 4gb, hoping to slowly bring it down but to no avail. Hope this makes sense. Any help would be great Dave