pantscat

Ah... I'm really trying to kill off novell... I think £3k to see the back of it is a small price to pay!

What's NSS? Northern Storage Suite? Surely that's not a freebie these days!?

I'm currently looking at virtualising my servers using VSphere and I've got two Novell Netware boxes that are currently doing file serving that can't be virtualised (thank god!) so I'm thinking about moving the data over to a CIFS NAS share on a Netapp FAS2020. NTP Software's QFS has been recommended to me as a good product for storage quotas - I'm just wondering if anyone has used it? Cheers, Ant

Hi All, I've got a bit of a conundrum... The network that I've inherited uses sophos enterprise console, and I'm a little puzzled as to how the local groups it creates on the client PCs are populated. In particular it seems that the "SophosOnAccess" group has no members which I can't think is the way it is supposed to be! (Other groups though do have members) I've looked everywhere but can't see where this is configured! Any pointers would be most welcome! Thanks, Ant EDIT - I got a reply from a very helpful person at Sophos who informs me that the group will always appear blank as it only contains the SYSTEM account.

Change it to NTLM authentication and hey-presto! I bet it will work... Actually... scrap that. NTLM identification should work too...

Cheers Ric - very handy to know!

I've been looking at these too... exactly how cheap is cheap?!

I've got a few questions about virtualising... Does Hyper-V have anything along the lines of the VMware-converter? Does it have anything to allow automatic fail-over? What are the benefits of using a SAN (such as the Sun 7110) over a NAS box such as a Netapp S330? Also - does anyone have a useful formula for speccing boxes for virtualisation? Cheers, Ant

The ISA server itself can still browse the web... That's interesting... there aren't any specific access rules for who can access the proxy. What type of rule would be required for that?

ISA is the proxy... (same box).

Have changed the firewall rule so that only the proxy is allowed through but I still get a 502 error from a proxying client. Very odd...

@leegcvcc - Yep proxy settings are set by GPO - but teachers occasionally bring in their own devices and like to hop on our wifi now and again. Yes the ISA box is acting as the router too. @Tom - at the moment the rule allows all outgoing protocols, but I'm going to restrict it to just port 80 and 443 traffic. Your suggestion to edit the 'internal set' gives me an idea... I could create a custom 'network set' that only contains the IP of the proxy... it might work. Hmm... <\strokes chin>

Hi All, I'm having a friday moment. My brain is winding down ready for the weekend... Currently we have ISA 2006 setup as firewall and proxy (two NICs, one internal and one straight out to the 'net). We have an access rule that currently allows the 'internal' network to get HTTP access to the 'external' network. At present if a PC is configured with the ISA box as its default gateway it will happily get out to the internet without any proxy settings. I want this to stop. Obvious answer is to remove the D/G from DHCP - but surely there must be a way to allow only proxy requests out to the internet? I've tried changing the access rule to remove 'internal' and replace it with 'local host' but this doesn't work. I'm sure I'm missing something really obvious... but I can't figure it out! Any suggestions would be gratefully received... Ta, Ant

I still think 10k for a server is a bit steep! But then it depends on how much storage you require. I'm currently looking at getting 2 new DCs and my budget for this is only £4,500 (albeit with only 250GB of storage each).

Ahh... well good hardware RAID is great. Software based RAID not so much. The simplest way to take advantage of RAID would be to use it to create several logical drives which are just mirrors (so one disk is an identical clone of the other)... So disk 1+2 would mirror each other and be drive C: Disk 3+4 would mirror each other and be drive D: Disk 5+6 would.... you get the picture. That's a nice simple way to get some redundancy. RAID 5 is even better... but you'd need a minimum of 3 disks per logical drive. I'll stop now and not bore you any more but shout if you want to know more. A

I think you could probably save a fair bit of money by cutting down on the amount of RAM the system has got - if it's just a DC and doing some application sharing then you'd probably get away with 2GB, and 4GB would give you plenty of head room. (edited to say)... and you could also chop off one of the CPUs. Just out of curiosity, why are you not using a RAID array? Ant

Surely it depends on the type of VLE you go for? Maybe you could have a nice setup that is based on Windows SharePoint services (with nice themed pages customised to look like your school) that then links through to Moodle (for VLE Content) and you could then either use a custom SharePoint list for helpdesk stuff or link to another helpdesk (maybe something PHP based). It should be possible to incorporate all of these things within SharePoint so it appears to the end user that they're never actually leaving the "main VLE site". Just my 2p worth...

For a standalone solution Cisco WAPs are very good (coverage IMHO is much better than equivelent 3com/netgear/linksys) - very reliable and a good range of aerial configurations. Plus it would be quite easy to upgrade to a fully centrally managed system at a later date should they want to (using a Cisco manager-type-box-thingy).

Hi all, Bit of an odd one this. I've got a snazzy new photocopier that will scan to email... so far so good. Have set it up with our internal SMTP server IP and it says it is sending mail happily (but mail never turns up at the other end) When I run message tracking in Exchange it tells me that message delivery has failed: - SMTP: Message submitted to advanced queuing - SMTP: Started message submission to advanced queue - SMTP: Advanced Queue failed to deliver message. I'm able to successfully send email through the SMTP server using a telnet connection and so I'm a little stumped as to what is going on. Is there a way to turn on more detailed logging? (There's nothing in the event logs at present to tell me why it says "no") Cheers, Ant

Cheers chaps! Have got it working now... Ant

That looks perfect... only trouble is the b*gger wont work - keep getting "Directory Services API error: 34948". Hmm...

I want to export user data from NDS (mainly usernames, group memberships and path to their home drive) to a CSV file (or similar). Can anyone give me any pointers? Cheers, Ant

I've just been working on a lifecycle process for all hardware... at the moment (based on experience) I'm going for a 5 year life span for normal switches and 3 years for core switches (as we really don't want those to go pop...). I suppose it depends upon what manufacturer you using too - I'm basing these figures on 3com and Cisco kit - I'm not sure about the longevity of other stuff though. Ant

Audacity would probably do the job... Audacity: Free Audio Editor and Recorder

I'm planning to do this in the not too distant future (subject to budget approval of course!) so I'd be very interested too if anyone has any warnings! How tricky can it be though?