smurfomatic

We're currently in the process of transferring our broadband supplier from the company which provides our email to BT infinity. When we switch the cabling over, we are disconnected from external emails - incoming ones queue up, and outgoing ones give a "550 relay not permitted" error when they bounce back. Internet connection works fine on the new system, so that's not the problem. Obviously this must be to do with mail server authentication - as it works fine when we go back to the email provider's connection. However, the details in the mail server have been rolled over from at least two previous setups and I have no idea where the authentication information needs to go. Where would I look to input the details, as I've found various places. The fact we've been using this company since 1998 and they won't co-operate with the migration isn't really helping matters... Any help gratefully received, as the kids come back on Thursday and we need it transferred before that if possible.

Just opened up the first of a batch of new Chromebooks, and having a right hassle getting it online - should be easy?! It has the correct wireless settings, as it'll browse our local pages (Outlook Web Access and MIS portal) but won't go online. We've got two possibilities for a proxy server - our Smoothwall and the web server (which still has to handle certain applications that won't work through Smoothwall). Tried using both IP addresses as the proxy server, stillr efuses to connect. Wireless network is g, WPA-TKIP but can't see why this would cause a problem if it's happy to browse locally? Any ideas before I get stroppy and hurl them across the room?

Pete - see the other thread I posted, with the same title, at the same time for some reason. Seems to be a GPO problem which I now hope is sorted. Thanks.

Seems it was completely unrelated to the new switches. The problem only came to light when I sent a message around saying "new switches installed - let me know of any problems." Turns out the freezing has been going on for a while but no-one bothered to tell me... Seems that disabling all the GPOs stopped the freezing, so it's got to be a conflict there of some kind.

OK, definitely not the wireless as I've just "frozen" while plugged into an ethernet cable. Still nothing unusual showing in the logs. Next step, disabling the GPOs - thankfully the school's pretty empty at the moment so won't cause any issues!

Plenty of ideas to try out, thanks - hopefully will get some time tomorrow or Thursday to see if they clear up the problems.

Thanks shadowx, I'll take a look at your suggestions.

FN-GM: The machines should have all unessential (that is, everything except AVG and file synchronisation) switched off in msconfig. I'll check just to make sure though. Forgot to mention they're connecting over wireless, which has patchy coverage in some places. However, one of the "afflicted" staff has his machine directly under an access point...

We've had a problem on our network over the last few weeks and I can't fathom what's causing it. A member of staff will log in to their laptop, the desktop will appear but the machine then freezes and has to be powered off to get going again. Sometimes the second time it'll be fine, others it'll take three or four attempts. This seems to happen to some staff more than others (either that or they're the only ones that bother to tell me there's a problem...) - some with laptops only a few months old, if it was just those with older machines I could understand it. All laptops are running XP SP3 with Office 2010, servers run Server 2003 R2 standard. One server holds the staff emails and shared documents, the other holds profiles for staff and students. Problems seem to be getting worse since we had some network upgrades - gigabit switches installed at various points in the school. I can't see why this would cause the issue to get worse, but it's the only thing that's changed recently. Nothing showing up in the server or laptop logs as far as I can tell, does anyone know what the problem may be? Sorry that this is a bit vague, but school broke up on Friday and the last few weeks of term are so busy I haven't had much time to look at the problem.

We've had a problem on our network over the last few weeks and I can't fathom what's causing it. A member of staff will log in to their laptop, the desktop will appear but the machine then freezes and has to be powered off to get going again. Sometimes the second time it'll be fine, others it'll take three or four attempts. This seems to happen to some staff more than others (either that or they're the only ones that bother to tell me there's a problem...) - some with laptops only a few months old, others that are older I could understand. All laptops are running XP SP3 with Office 2010, servers run Server 2003 R2 standard. One server holds the staff emails and shared documents, the other holds profiles for staff and students. Problems seem to be getting worse since we had some network upgrades - gigabit switches installed at various points in the school. I can't see why this would cause the issue to get worse, but it's the only thing that's changed recently. Nothing showing up in the server or laptop logs as far as I can tell, does anyone know what the problem may be? Sorry that this is a bit vague, but school broke up on Friday and the last few weeks of term are so busy I haven't had much time to look at the problem.

We need someone to come in to give us an independent assessment of our network infrastructure. That is, what we've got, and what needs to be done to get it up to a reasonable level. Can anyone recommend a company which would undertake a survey like this? The main part of school is an old stone building, so wireless signals get eaten up. We have around 12 access points in this area already, and yet there are still dead spots.

Figured it out in the end. I set up an automatic formatting rule on each of the recipients, using the Advanced section there is an Autoforwarded flag under "frequently used fields". Just hoping neither of them has another autoforward set up...

We have recently created a new position fo "Head of Pre Prep" and and email account preprephead@... to go along with it. This account has to be redirected to both the Head and the Pre Prep secretary. No problems there - account created, mailbox set up, Outlook rule configured to redirect all incoming mail to both staff. However, I need a way of highlighting these emails in the recipient's inbox (so that they stand apart from "normal" emails). I was hoping I could use Automatic Formatting in Outlook, but this won't work as there's no way of distinguishing if Mrs Jones sent it directly to the staff concerned, rather than to the preprephead account. I also tried adding something into the Outlook rule, but you can't mix server-side (redirection) and client-side (categories, importance etc.) rules. Is there a straightforward way of doing this? I know Office XP is hideously out of date now (we are, slowly, rolling out 2010) but I hope that it's possible.

We have Server 2003, happily running OWA over a no-ip.org domain, with the OWA folder being blahblah.no-ip.org/exchange/ No problems there, that is until I have to try and configure our information system's external access ("portal"). This needs mapping to the internal portal link server:82 and for the life of me I can't see how to do this without (a) getting a second domain, (b) losing OWA or © setting OWA or the portal on another server. I've tried using a virtual directory for the portal, it doesn't work properly. It was set up as /portal/ and only half loaded the site. I'm advised by their support to route external traffic to port 82 on the server. Am I right in thinking I can only route to port 82 by sending all traffic there? This would surely stop the /exchange/ link from working, right? The internal portal website is set up on the same server (as a separate site) in IIS manager so when I try to redirect external traffic to server:82 it conflicts. Having only ever fiddled with minor parts of IIS before, and having no-one here who has any more experience, I'm hoping someone can help! Sorry if some of this needs explaining, ask questions about my setup and I'll try to answer them.

Thanks Andy, I will get in touch with them.

Thanks for the advice, various companies advertise they will recover dead sticks. I intend to go with a "no fix no fee" company. If there's no recovery, it's not my problem - I'll have done all that I could possibly be expected to, and my colleague will have to recover three years of work from memory or email attachments...

Matthew - I'm sure the member of staff in question will learn the documents on his laptop get synced to the server, which is backed up on a daily basis... Robmal - I've tried the soldering iron approach, after a while fiddling it looks like some sort of component failure. Here's hoping the data is recoverable, otherwise he'll be in an even worse mood!

Matthew - I thought of trying that, but as I won't be covering the cost of the repair I'd much rather get the data back and use it as an example that the IT department is always right...

Has anyone out there used a data recovery company for USB memory sticks? We have one here that's completely dead (not detected in Windows, doesn't light up) which has a staff member's entire working life on it. Various companies I've seen quote around £150 for recovery, which is fine, but I'd rather use one that's recommended if possible. Thanks.

Demodog - the Bloxx price was roughly twice that of Smoothwall. The Bloxx rep did say they could do something with the price, but I didn't think I'd get a 50% discount...

Thanks for all the advice. We're probably going with Smoothwall - after explaining that Websense was too expensive, Bloxx then quoted more...

Thanks nephilim - as I said, had no real problems with Websense just don't think it's worth the price they're charging. Tom - we only really need straightforward stuff - filtering based on category, AD integration to apply different filtering to staff and students, add our own URLs to whatever category. Can you give me a rough idea of costing for a hardware appliance as we don't really have a server we can give up entirely? It'd certainly free up some resources on the second server, which is an added bonus!

Sorry, forgot to add - we have around 300 students, 70 staff and 200 PCs/laptops over the site.

Our current web filtering (Websense) is due for renewal at the end of August. Don't get me started on that as a renewal date, as the salesmen only get in touch once the head of department has gone on holiday... Never had any issues with Websense, but the renewal price seems steep - 50% up on when we last renewed in 2008 (3 year contract, obviously). Our current supplier is recommending Bloxx as a cheaper solution, but having read a few messages on here it seems Smoothwall is the preferred option. Just to fill you in a bit on the network layout - we have two servers, one of which acts as web server and the other holds the student's accounts. Websense is installed on the second one, where the replacement would be installed (or alongside if a hardware solution). One other thing we're looking into is some spam filtering for the staff accounts (annoyingly their email is on the first server). A combined solution would be great, I see Smoothwall do both - what's their pricing structure like? Only found a brief moment to look into this so far as I'm trying to get stuff finished before I go on holiday on Thursday. Any help is appreciated.

Server now set to 40GB, and the staff told to tidy things up a bit! We'll see if that clears the problem when tonight's backup runs.