smurfomatic

I had a Digital laptop - with built in trackball! - in fact I still have it somewhere.

eMachines by any chance? Tiny stood for "Tough it's now yours" at my former employers as we had so many come in for repair...

Not quite an autocorrect, but I'm prone to spelling mistakes when trying to type quickly. The worst is when I (on a regular basis) shift the "o" of "account" one letter to the left...it'll get me into serious trouble one day!

Not quite catastrophic (in fact, all data was recovered) but a tale to tell... August 2013 - a couple of days before the start of term. Main server (DC, Exchange, email & MIS host) falls over. Seems to be related to a HD failure so that is swapped and a restore began. For some unfathomable reason, restore reports it'll take around 100 hours to complete! No way to figure out why (as pressure was on to get things up and running) so left it running over the weekend. Backup restore reaches 99% then fails. System still not running. Turns out - after further investigation - it's not a hard drive problem but the controller. Frantic order for a new server (old one was about seven years old) and system back up and running a few days later. Two weeks I could have done without! New backup procedures will be implemented this summer, alongside a change around of classrooms - single physical server hosting our two machines as virtual servers. Backing up to NAS device in separate building. If we have to use any further DR procedures, data recovery will be the least of our problems - two of the three school buildings will have been destroyed...

For anyone that enjoys (mainly) rugby photography, check out my Flickr. There are a few shots of other things in there too, like this visitor to a classic car show (that's my car in the foreground)

Thanks for sorting it out, all booked now! No need for a hotel as I'm less than an hour away, plus have to be in work on the Friday

@Dos_Box - any further news on when the Eventbrite page will be up and running? Now I've got approval from the management to attend, I want to make sure I get a place!

Agree with difinity - try taking a PSU & CPU from a "working" machine and swap them (one at a time) to see if that solves it. New PSUs might be worth the outlay, new CPUs probably not, and if you test it and there's still a fault it's likely to be a motherboard failure...

You said you tried upgrading the BIOS. Have you tried resetting to default values? Sounds as if there may be a physical fault, then again to have the same thing happen on seven machines would be rather strange.

Does seem to indicate a faulty CD drive - does it spin up when trying to boot from CD, or just skip it and go straight to HD boot? Worth opening it up and checking the cable isn't loose, and if you've got one hook in a different CD drive. I use Hiren Boot CD for "rescues" like this, a great combination of tools to get me out of most holes I've dug myself into...

Geoff - the main bugbear is an Aficio MP C3300 which has an engineer out around once a week (or so it seems!) with paper jams, finisher faults etc. It's just short of a million pages but there's probably not much left of the original machine as it's had so many parts changed... The "behemoth" is a Pro C5100S, which seems to confound even the two UK based engineers who are trained to work with it! The frustrating thing with that particular machine is that we chose it on the understanding it'd do A6 booklets (A5 folded in half) but then found out it couldn't.

We currently have a lease with Ricoh for photocopiers - eight units, ranging from small B&W to a behemoth that does booklets and all sorts of other things. The lease is up for renewal in April and we're looking at other suppliers - we've had problems with some copiers (one of which admittedly does have a lot of pages per month) and would like recommendations for other options.

So, I ran ISinteg and ESEutil last night, didn't take as long as I was expecting but still hasn't solved the problem I've just tried using Exmerge to export the whole mailbox and reimport it without the permission, hoping that would help. No, it didn't. Final thing I could think of - create a new user, with the same email address (after renaming and disabling the original one) then re-import the Exmerge file into this account. That seems to have sorted it! Hopefully the backup running tonight will work...

Could be Michael, but would that affect just the one folder? Looking at System Manager the account in question is only 1.5GB, and is only 10th in the list on size - the biggest mailbox is approaching 9GB! We're on Outlook 2010 BTW.

We have an issue backing up one mailbox on our server. Using Backup Exec 10d on Server 2003 (I know, but they keep promising I'll get a new server soon!) it is failing to read one folder. All other folders backup fine, for this user and all others. Main problem is - it's the Inbox, and it's the Head's Inbox! When creating a backup job, if I drill down to this email account - Top of Information Store - Inbox, it shows as an empty folder. Trust me, it's not empty! They do have around 100 subfolders, but I've tried moving those out into another folder and that doesn't seem to be the issue. The "new" folder with the subfolders show up fine, but the Inbox still comes up blank. I even moved all but a few unread emails into the new folder and Inbox still didn't show up properly. This has been happening for a couple of weeks, since I last restarted the server. I've used PFDAVAdmin to check permissions and they all seem fine. I've even give the Administrator account full access to the Inbox and still no help, even after restarting the server. The only unusual thing about this account compared to others is that the Head's PA has permissions to access the emails, but that applies to all folders not just Inbox. I tried running ISinteg last night with all folder tests, took a couple of hours and still didn't solve the issue. My next step is to run ISinteg this weekend with "all tests" which I'm told could take 24 hours (our priv1.edb is 47GB) and also, while the store is offline, run ESEUtil to compact the database. Any further suggestions?

IanT - thanks, that looks really useful. I might even get a chance to read it some point soon! Rad - I'm assuming it was a network loop. Loop protection on one of the switches picked it up on one port, unplugged that cable and all is well. Haven't been able to trace back the port to find out where it is, but no-one's complaining about loss of service yet...

Ian - loop protection switched on as I went round! FN-GM - I will be setting up spanning tree, BPDU etc. once I get a chance to cath up with everything else I should have been doing. Oh, and I'm ordering a USB to serial converter as well...

Sorted! Found the port causing the network loop and disconnected it - not sure who it belongs to yet, but they'll start complaining once they realise everyone else is back online... Panicked when I couldn't get hold of a USB to serial adapter to plug in the console cable, fortunately the state school just down the road had one they lent to me. Thanks for all the advice, really helpful.

We have no VLANs set up, I will have to look into the logs directly I think - hopefully this will narrow down the search...

thanks rad - looks like I'll be doing a full tour during tomorrow anyway, may as well check for anything else plugged in while I'm there!

I'm expecting it to be the same Ben, just don't fancy having to check all those lovely new desktop ports that were fitted last September... [gets out network map and biro]

Mark - thanks, but we've got HP Proliant gear rather than Cisco.

Thanks Ben & Liam - I did think it may be a network loop, I need to go round and check all the cabinets tomorrow (you know, the ones no-one should be fiddling with) to make sure the cabling hasn't been messed with. I can't remember if loop protection is turned on, we had a major network upgrade this time last year which I was supposed to supervise but I had a ruptured appendix instead...

Oh, the joys of the new school year... Staff came back in for inset on Monday, all seemed fine until just after lunch and then the network ground to a halt - and still isn't right. Wireless devices struggle to connect as they're not being issued IP addresses quick enough and the DNS resolution tests from the Smoothwall are reporting delays - around 4 seconds. However, nothing's changed on either DHCP or DNS so I don't think that's the issue. It's as if there's a device "spamming" the network with broadcast messages (had this before with a faulty WAP) but running Wireshark doesn't show up any unusual activity. I've asked all staff to shut down their devices as they left today, and while there's still a few connected (we're a boarding school and have some resident staff) over 90% of devices are off the system and it's still running like a dog! Even pinging between two servers is getting a failure rate around 60%. Also, the Ruckus zone director keeps losing contact with its access points because it can't get the data through. One major concern of mine is that we have a company in installing new central heating - I'm hoping they haven't damaged a cable while drilling. That wouldn't account for issues between devices a lot closer together though - for example, the server in the teaching area struggles to communicate with the Smoothwall in the same room. I have tried: Restarting all servers Restarting network switches Rebooting Smoothwall and Zone Director Disabling DNS on servers alternately Clearing DHCP leases Please tell me I've not missed something obvious...

Thanks synaesthesia, we're planning to move everything over to Google Docs in the summer (hence the impending retirement of the server) so this sort of problem will be a thing of the past, hopefully. Still can't understand how it had never synced these particular files to the server, when the laptop is always "online", and the rest are OK...