pantscat

In my last school-based role I leased all of the hardware. In a nutshell, the school IT was chronically underfunded, all the kit, and I mean pretty much ALL of it wasn't fit for purpose, and so I had to find a way to make a huge capital investment palatable. After showing SMT the figure they needed to invest to get everything up to scratch, the leasing figures seemed much more reasonable. It was also a fairly good way of guaranteeing future investment in IT - the threat of the all the kit being taken away if the money wasn't made available seemed to do the trick quite nicely. I used Econocom for leasing, and found them to be pretty competitive, they were certainly very easy to deal with and had no issues returning kit. In some cases, depending upon what kit was being purchased, and the terms of the lease, it was cheaper than purchasing outright (assuming you'd replace the kit after 3 years). Oh, and check the terms of the lease for what would happen if you decide you want to retain ownership of the kit... costs vary depending upon the residual value and the deal you negotiate. One thing I would say is that you have to make sure your record keeping is spot-on, as kit moves around and you need to keep a track of it so that returns are as painless as possible. Happy to answer any other questions.

I think the user will need traverse folder permissions on the root share - nothing more than that though. @Cazale - can't do that on a Mac.

Hi Colin, I can help you out with this - I'll PM you some info. All the best, Ant

This x a billion. (maybe exaggerating slightly). But, yes, 7200rpm drives wont compete with "proper" fast SAS or SCSI drives unless you have a lot of them. I would suggest swapping these drives out for faster 15k drives, or getting a lot more 7200RPM drives (but you might be limited as to how many you physically put in your server) and configure them as a RAID 5+1 array to get the most performance.

That's a great suggestion - forgot about that!

PM sent.

How about one of the blank HTML5 themes and something like SiteOrigin page builder? Thinking out loud a little here, but that might do the trick. Does seem like an odd way to develop a website though! Seems like you're in a tricky position.

I'm not aware of anything that's free and will take an online image level backup. Could be an opportunity to go P2V? It's painless... honest!

Possible culprits: 1. IEM - Even thought Internet Explorer maintenance is now deprecated, if you had an old group policy with the settings in, they may still be there taking effect even though you can't see them. 2. WPAD/PAC file - Check DNS and DHCP. Check for an option 252 in DHCP, or for DNS entries check for an alias called "WPAD". 3. Roaming/mandatory profiles - check the profile for any tattooed settings. 4. Erm... Evil web pixies. Good luck!

Perhaps as part of the setup and handover they can walk you through the config and how everything is put together? That's the sort of thing I normally do (as well as comprehensive documentation, of course!)...

I would setup multiple scopes for each VLAN and then use DHCP reservations where appropriate. This means that it's all done from a single point of administration. Use DHCP failover (a nice littel feature in 2012) to ensure that you've got some redundancy just in case.

Yep - Broadcast traffic can be a problem, mainly because it self proliferates - one device broadcasts, all devices get it, then they all shout back...

Generally .local and .internal domain names aren't a great idea in case you want to use a "proper" SSL certificate internally from a Public CA. That's the main reason I'm aware of.

Lol... yep. How about "domain.internal" or "contoso.com"?

What version of Exchange are you running? AFAIK only Exchange 2003 was happy with domain renames... So... I'd go for a migration.

Ok it was a punt! - Just wanted to check keychain hadn't become corrupt. It's something to do with the fact that \etc\authorization has been deprecated - odd though, I thought this happened in 10.9, so not quite sure why it should be causing you issues right now. I'll dust off my Macbook and have a dig around.

Hi Aaron, I'd guess that this is a keychain issue. Can you access KeyChain and unlock it? (e.g. the little padlock in the bottom corner)

Have you setup a multicast scope in DHCP?

Ideally it's best to keep the subnets smaller as this will decrease the amount of broadcast traffic. Perhaps you could further segregate your WiFi clients by type or by security/access requirements, e.g. a VLAN for student laptops, another for iPads/tablets, and another for any staff devices. Yes, nothing stopping you, technically, from having different subnet masks. /21 is a huge subnet though, 2048 possible hosts... seems overkill for a server VLAN.

Check your DHCP scope, is DC1 listed as a DNS server?

When you say "getting the old DNS" - do you mean that they're getting that IP as a DNS server (e.g. from DHCP)? or they're trying to contact it as a DC?

It seems that the firm installing the switches haven't really explained things to you very well. Each VLAN will be a separate subnet - so you will have to modify your internal IP addressing somewhat. For example: VLAN 1 - Servers - 10.1.1.1 - 10.1.1.254 (subnet 255.255.255.0) VLAN 2 - Printers - 10.1.2.1 - 10.1.2.254 (subnet 255.255.255.0) VLAN 3 - Wired Clients - 10.1.3.1 - 10.1.3.254 (subnet 255.255.255.0) VLAN 4 - WiFi Clients - 10.1.4.1 - 10.1.4.254 (subnet, yep, you guessed it, 255.255.255.0) etc... Any of these subnets that require DHCP IP addresses could get them from your DHCP server - you'd have a separate scope for each VLAN/subnet. It's straightforward to do as long as you plan it correctly - feel free to ask any specific questions.

Personally, if you're going to the bother of segregating the network at all, I'd create different VLANs for each type of device - so a VLAN for clients, a separate one for printers (these can be noisy sods in terms of broadcast traffic), and another for servers... etc. Try and keep things logical - and document everything.

Didn't realise that it wasn't best-practice anymore! You learn something new every day!

Agreed... ShowPoint (ShowPoint | Auto-start Digital Signage Presentations) and a load of Intel Compute sticks (or generic versions) could be a more cost effective option if you only need to display PowerPoint presentations.