mrbios

Next time you're buying switches go for HP Procurves Stability of Cisco and the simplicity of netgear combined into one easy package.

My SCCM server has 4 cores and 8gb ram assigned, could maybe do with upping the ram a little bit but it's generally quite smooth, probably doesn't need 4 cores to be honest. I use it for WSUS and EPP primarily, I don't really use the OS deployment as we generally feel that WDS is so quick and simple that what SCCM offers us there isn't worth the time it takes to setup and administer, though i do have it setup to an extent. Also this link is so damn valuable: System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Guides - Configuration Manager 2012 - www.windows-noob.com DCs use barely any processing power or ram really, all they really like is a decent network connection. My 2008R2 DCs only have 1 core + 2gb ram assigned and they're lovely and smooth, when it was 2003 they were happy with just 1gb ram. Depending on the spec you could probably put them to good use as vm hosts What you could do is use a lower power box and do a P2V on the DCs to free up the better hardware, install vmware/hyper-v whichever you choose (Though VMware is better ) and move your DC VM on to the newly created virtual hosts once it's ready.

If that's the case then surely you have some decent servers already in place? Are you virtualised? I only ask because I hate the idea of spending X amount on a box that's going to be running 24/7 but only doing one task in this day n age. Each to their own i know, but just trying to see if you can be more energy efficient with the whole thing. If you have any servers that aren't far off needing to be replaced you could always propose virtualising your SCCM install on to a new box that would also replace another and take over their roles? with 1600 users and 700 clients I only have 5 physical servers you see, it's amazing what can be squashed into a box, that includes exchange, sccm, SQL server, multiple DCs, file server etc (30 VMs in total spread over 4 hosts) Just giving you ideas incase you hadn't thought of them, feel free to ignore me though if it's just not possible

How big of a school are you? for what you're saying you can't afford it seems you only want to spend about £300 or so? to be honest if a school can't afford a proper server it makes me wonder if it's big enough to really need SCCM?

I don't fully understand what you're asking to be honest, but are you aiming to have two SSIDs whereby each provides a different client IP depending on which SSID you connect to, whereby connecting to Guest gives you an IP of say 172.18.77.x but connecting to the secure gives you an IP of 172.18.76.x for example? Where the IP range given by the guest is a secured vLan cut off from accessing the rest of the network? If not then I've completely misunderstood

+1 for impero! Looking forward to using v4 in the coming weeks

Having spoken to exa, schools broadband, exponential-e, Global AXS, M247, BT, SP-solutions and having revised pricing from SWGfL......i can safely say that the one I'm both most impressed with on the basis of SLA and additional services, and also happens to have been by far the best price for a leased line (not to mention providing exactly what we want in regards to firewall and filtering) is schools broadband What we do next hinges entirely on what we do about our VLE, because if senior management decide they like MyBigCampus enough to replace our current dreadful uniservity VLE with it then we may be in a pretty strong position. Everything feels like it's coming together

How come? Virtualised fine here on VMware and never had an issue, even when i was underspeccing it with ram.

Well the physical storage for my DFS-R shares are replicated between two iSCSI devices, one of which is connected to a physical box (the backup side that isn't written to) and one is connected to a VM (the side that gets written to and everyone points to for connecting to the shares) Soon though (summer) I'm going to be changing those shares so that they are RDMs (Raw device mappings) directly to VMware and then allocated that way. EDIT: Emailed two companies to give me pricing for Veeam so i'll compare it to our backup exec quotes

Well in 2010 it would work one week and not the next, randomly throwing up errors that symantec never appeared to be able to resolve for me, and now that I'm trying 2012 I've been hit with a bug that won't even let me backup half my DFS-R folders AT ALL. It's a known bug but their workaround doesn't fix it, seems to be that i get a problem in every version of backup exec, not to mention it randomly leaving behind snapshots of VMs when it's finished backing up which i find really really annoying. Veeam does appear to be quite a popular choice around here, albeit looks quite expensive? i might take a look at Microsoft DPM first for normal backups seeing as that's included in our EES i think, cheers

Honestly give up with backup exec, every single version from 12.5, 2010 and it's various revisions and 2012 have all been pieces of junk. I need something that can do the following and do it well (even willing to split them off between two pieces of software if need be or to make it cheaper): Backup of DFS-R folders totaling around 1TB - this is where backup exec really seems to fail me Backup of VMware ESXi5.1, around 30VMs - Again backup exec constantly seems to be getting stuck or failing to backup various VMs Backup of exchange - This seems to be the one bit backup exec copes with Backup of AD - optionally would like it but not essential due to VM backups Backup of SQL - optionally would like it but not essential due to backing up in other ways Can anyone recommend me anything?

Exchange 2010 SP3 here, 2000 mailboxes - 24Gb ram, runs a treat Here's the microsoft document on memory requirements: Understanding Memory Configurations and Exchange Performance: Exchange 2010 Help So essentially if you have every single role on one server and your mailboxes, 32GB is basically a minimum. Granted that's fine in theory but in practice you never quite seem to need that much, it's clearly stated though. 10Gb for example will always cause exchange to struggle, infact i once had my exchange server running only 8Gb ram, and it crawwwwwwwwwwwwled.

Really? You and Marling are closer to the exchange than we are and we can definitely get it here, we were assured of that by a few providors, hell you're practically across the road from the exchange aren't you? haha. Our SWGfL contract ends in August, which is handy, gives us the summer to do the full switchover.

So I've finally decided on a firewall (Palo Alto) and almost finalised a decision on a filter (Lightspeed or Bloxx) now I need to decide on an internet providor, but first i need to decide on the technology to use..... Now the majority of us are on Leased lines, which works well enough but it's so damn expensive. We had a quote for a connection from Exa which happened to be FTTC, but I'm a bit skeptical after reading a comment from @SchoolsBroadband (of which I've just send a note via their website to contact me ) in another thread that the 1:1 contention ratio they're claiming is legit? We're currently on a 30mb on a 100mb bearer leased line from the LA, we're 100% certain about leaving this connection behind and never looking back, but all of my leased line quotes so far put us at just over £10kpa for the same speed which we feel is just too much. The FTTC offering was less than half the cost of a leased line for 75mb, EFM only goes up to 35mb and I'm still unsure of the cost. Can anyone who's gone through the same process shed some light on what they've done or doing in this situation? Are leased lines really needed or can other technologies fill the gap? and here i was breathing a sigh of relief after finally deciding on a firewall, thinking the rest would be easy choice....HA yea right, just trying to get 3 quotes for the same technology (for example exa supplying FTTC, and i can't seem to get any directly comparable quotes!) seems to be hard work so far...

Cheers chaps, can't believe i didn't think of movie maker! and faststone resizer looks perfect

I've got 60 pictures to go on our TV system, they're all 4000x3000 or bigger and i need them all to play in sequence...short of uploading 700mb of images or faffing about trying to put them into one powerpoint (which would no doubt mean messing around resizing them) can anyone recommend a really quick way of sticking 60 jpg images into a sequence like a video file or something without having to worry about resizing them etc?

Either one is good in my opinion, my original thought was to have it automatically archive them every term. So set the term times like you do with the booking sheet, then at the end of every term the closed tickets get archived off. That would also allow us to see statistics for each term if you were able to implement such a thing?

Finally I've had a presentation from all 3 big suppliers, had a play with the software from all 3 and given all companies a damn good grilling. I think from my questioning and investigation of all 3 companies I've decided that I'm going to have a bloxx trial first. Bloxx looked like the better filter, i liked their software and while they don't have all the features in place that we want yet they certainly seemed to be on the case. After that I'm going to test lightspeed, they had all the features we wanted and more but potentially weren't as good in the area of blocking out unwanted pages, really liked my big campus though!

You can't build a skyscraper on a mud puddle. Start from the ground up, explain to management that money needs spending on the infrastructure first, and like a skyscraper the sky comes last (in this case, sky = wireless) you need a 3-5 year plan to be honest as from the sounds of things it's not going to be a 1 years budget type of job.

You should certainly be able to use it for VPN, NAC and firewall, as far as I'm aware though the palo alto kit doens't do email filtering and its web filtering isnt going to be as educationally focused as the lightspeed i wouldn't have thought? Best off keeping the lightspeed imo and using the PA for the rest? Out of curiousity which model of PA firewall are you going for? I'm in the process of deciding on a new firewall but I'm a bit naive when it comes to firewall specs, don't know if i should be going for the PA-500 or the PA-2020 (700 devices and 1600 users on a 100mb connection) if i could just hijack your thread for a second and ask if someone could point me to which model i should be going for that'd be muchos appreciated

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh for christ sake, i just rebuilt an image yesterday!!!!!!!! >_< And I've just deployed 4 of these fabled hotfixes to all the PCs in the school because i was hit with the slow boot issue. *BANGS HEAD AGAINST WALL* EDIT: oh and just to really make it feel like it's rubbing it in.....the KB Article ID is the same as one of my IDs here at work! WHAT THE ****!

"Problem exists between chair and keyboard"

Another helpdesk request..... Basically, when you get over the 500 closed tickets mark, by the time of archiving off and creating a clean xml file i have nearly 700 tickets in one xml file which was painfully slow. A fix for this would be wonderful

Just had lightspeed in, got to have a little play with their demo box and i really like the look of it and my big campus (we're currently with uniservity which is dire) lots more to consider, just bloxx to look at next week now Really looking forward to the day we get whichever option we go for in, the improvments for us a huge.

Hi Paul, It's working a treat, we use it in our science labs and main hall (music teacher doing rehearsals) and not had any issues with it over the wireless Obviously will depend on your wireless capabilities but even in areas where we haven't got decent managed wireless yet when it's going through old nasty D-Link independent APs its still worked wonderfully, and it's very easy to setup once your client AP is configured.