pantscat

Thanks - will check out the capacity planning doc. What does 2x offer over ThinStation? anything in particular?

I'm thinking about dabbling in the world of ThinClients but have a few questions. I've got about 60 PCs in one particular room (a rather ridiculously huge room) and the performance is suffering (they're low powered AMD Athlons with 512MB ram) - I'm not sure I'm going to get the funds to replace them in the near future and the performance of the machines starting to affect the quality of teaching there. So... I though I'd have a look at ThinStation with Windows 2008R2 RDS - mainly because it's technology that I'd feel fairly comfy with. Can anyone offer any advice? These are my main questions: 1. Is ThinStation the best terminal software? Is there anything else that would be better for 'free'? 2. How do you setup a 'base-image' using Remote Desktop Services? Is there a nice guide anywhere? 3. What sort of spec server would I want to use for 60-ish clients? (I do have an old Dell PE2500, dual Xeons 12GB RAM, not much disk space though - maybe 120GB in RAID 5). 4. Is there anything else I need to know before I delve into the world TS? Much appreciated! Ant

Did you also get a LAN with 10 - 15% packet loss? That was a nice little welcome.

Ooh... this is a fun one. When I took over the current role, the documentation I received was the administrator password... and some very out of date network diagrams. You can imagine that I was pleased. But... in the past when I've left roles I've left all of the following: - Budget breakdowns and spending records. - Network diagrams (both logical and physical) - Full inventories of all IT owned equipment (including specs, maintenance history and purchase information). - Server overview docs (e.g. what server does what and why - what it is, what is it's IP etc.) - Overview documents for all systems in use (e.g. How is Exchange setup, ISA, SIMS, FOG) - Software licences - plus a summary document explaining what is licensed and how (e.g. Is it Microsoft Select or Schools, what's on a rolling licence) That's about it I think!

Just remembered - I did have to use a Windows 7/ 2008 GPO to push the settings out.

XP SP3 works fine... (I do it here).

Keep a log of all the 'silly things' she does - times, dates, time spent on tasks (in a subtle fashion though!). Raise your concerns with anyone in SLT who you feel comfortable to do so. I've seen this sort of thing many times before... it's a sad fact of life that some people can talk the talk, but they get everyone else to do the walking. You're doing nothing wrong by raising your concerns, if you were in SLT you'd want someone to make you aware of this, wouldn't you?

@_Bat_ - thanks for that - just double checked and I've got OD kerberos disabled. I think it was just my impatience and ignorance that was the problem!

Thanks Clare - that's good to know!

Cheers for that - I think everything is working now!

I never knew that! Genius! I owe you a beer... Is there a way to make it default to displaying the 'green light'?

@Tricky_Dicky - Ah! I did wonder if it was a permissions issue... but didn't really think too much about it. That makes sense now - I'll try it with a test user and report back. Thanks - I'll try changing the logon box and see how it goes! Have changed to "username and password" showing... but I can't see a green light... am I being dim?

Already checked out DNS - it's all hunky-dory. Just my normal three DCs.

Sorry about that - I did ramble a bit. Issue number 2 is solved. Issue 1 and 3 still here...

Ah... I seem to be answering my own questions. (It's like an online version of talking to yourself and slowly slipping into insanity). So... the fix above works for 10.5 as well as 10.6. Turns out that you need to pretend that your mac is a linux box, use a terminal and vi to edit the file. Who knew?! ;-) Wow... one down... two to go. I thought these mac things were supposed to "just work". Still, I do like the shiny loveliness of my Macbook Air.

Hmm... found this (Mac OS X v10.6: Successive Active Directory users receive "You are unable to log in to the user account (username) at this time" alert) relating to issue number 2 - but I can't find the file it refers to in the KB article. In fact I can't even find a folder called "etc". Surely it's on the MacOSX volume somewhere?!

Further investigation shows that I get these issues on 10.5 and 10.6... bah!

Nope... no bonjour issues here!

Hello, I've recently bought a Mac mini server and have been playing around with AD/OD integration. I've got my macs bound to AD and OD, and I've set the AD binding to map the user's home folder based on the entry in AD. I've got three issues that I'd quite like help with... Number 1: The home directory mapping seems to be working absolutely fine for staff (the home folder connects without a problem) - but it doesn't work for pupils at all - I always get a message: "The home folder for user "bananas" is not located in the usual place or cannot be accessed. The home or users folder may have been moved or deleted. If the home folder is locatedon the network, the server may be unavailable temporarily." Any ideas? The user can connect to the folder absolutely fine by using "Go --> Connect to Server" which is odd. Issue number 2: If I sucessfully login using an AD account, then logout and try and login again using a different AD account I get a message "You are unable to log in to the user account "bananas" at this time" (Logging in to the account failed because an error occurred). What's going on there?! Issue number 3: When the system boots up it takes it a brief moment to show the "Other..." user logon option. Then if I choose that to logon using an AD account it takes a few attempts (or a minute of waiting or so) before the user will authenticate properly. Having been initially skeptical about having Mac integration there was a brief moment when I got excited about the prospect when I got it working nicely on my macbook. Now that I've discovered these other little quirks I'm now back to being a bit skeptical. I'd be really grateful for any pointers. Thanks, Ant

I've got one of those as my core switch, but currently not using that many ports (just servers and fibre uplinks at the moment). You need cable management at the side though... cunning pokey-through cable management (I believe that's the technical term for it) - and I also use some velcro wrappy things to keep the cables in nice tidy bundles. I hope that makes sense. I've not had any coffee yet so I'm not really 'alive' yet.

Is there a central management tool for this? Something that will let you deploy apps to groups of computers? I dabbled with application virtualisation about two years ago with SVS... it worked quite well for some packages, but for others it was a real pain. The most awful thing about it was how the central administration through Altiris was bolted on as an after thought.

I hope I'm not being too patronising ;-), but... given what you have available to you (e.g. no documentation, no management of the switch and the fact that you have a very busy core switch) I'd approach this in a methodical and logical manner. If you've got a hub and spoke network topology, I'd do this: 1. Start by unplugging all of the fibre uplinks - monitor the switch activity, has the problem gone away? If yes, go to step 3, if not, go to step 2. 2. Unplug all devices from the core switch and reconnect them one by one (with a few mins gap inbetween each) this way if you've got a device that has a faulty NIC, or is sending out junk the switch will have a chance to start displaying 'poorly symptoms' again. 3. Reconnect each remote cab one by one with a suitable gap inbetween each, until the problem is identified as existing again - then you can be reasonable sure the problem is associated with the most recently connected remote cab - trouble shoot that! Hope this helps.

I'd go for Contingency or Research and Development.... that's always a good one!

Have you tried something like wireshark? Do a bit of a packet sniff and see what the traffic is and where it's coming from? If there are lots of spanning tree changes you'll see it in WireShark by filtering for STP, MSTP, or RSTP packets. Did the providing company leave you with any documentation?

@ themightymrp - do you move those HDDs around a lot though? off site storage?