Roberto

Never mind being a scouser and not buying the sun since hillborough; I'm a gooner and I've not brought it since then. It's not fit to wrap chips in, never mind read.

I can only echo Andrew's comments. Unless there is something fundamentally wrong with your current domain structure (and you've said nothing to suggest that there is) then this is basic stuff from both a AD and Exchange migration point of view. Avoiding migrating "any crud that inevitably exists in a 6 yr old system" is as simple as simply retiring all the old servers once the new servers are in place and working properly. (Note that when I say "simply retiring" AD and Exchange servers - there is a process to be followed for both domain controllers and exchange servers for this, which you will need to follow, but its not difficult, just a bunch of work that has to be done) I don't mean that to belittle you for asking, so I hope it doesn't come across that way, I mean to say that this is a great chance to keep it as simple as possible and take advantage of the easy parts of the migration routine. You can get major portions of the job done simply, giving you more time to spend polishing the new features of the updated system, and ironing out any small bugs that do pop up on the migrated result without having to stress yourself or your users out unduly.

Nice. We may well steal that.

We can't exactly host an open day for everyone off our own backs, but if we can work out a schedule then you and others are welcome to visit. I don't think we've got anything that special going on though...

I'm not sure that follows... I was going to make a somewhat flippant comment that a self employed "professional" driving instructor probably owns only the one car (or at least only one they can teach in) but even without looking at people like that, professional doesn't mean "£$£ big business £$£" - there are plenty of people out there working for themselves in a professional capacity who can't afford to carry a lot of spare kit.

Really? They do that? I'm so glad we avoided Cisco for our infrastructure refit. Only bit of kit in our place is the JANET-owned router (with no side to side air flow) and that's still more Cisco on site than I would ideally like.

Working along the lines of the H&S principles Tony mentions, this is how we plan racks at Luton Six Form College: UPS (not that we have any in rack in server rooms these days) at the bottom of the cab - H&S dictates keeping the amount of lifting needed to get these beasts into place to a minimum, not to mention avoiding making the rack top-heavy. SANs tend to go just above these lower level things, again avoiding putting very heavy stuff higher up than needed. We don't put these right at the bottom of the cab tho due to advice from Dell/Unisys who pointed out that disk enclosures pull a lot of air in and if they're at the bottom of the cab this will include a lot of dust. Switches - if they're network infrastructure, then in a network infrastructure cabinet. If they're part of something else (e.g. phone system, iSCSI) then with the item they support. That's how we do it anyway, if you can't have a separate switch cab then I'd suggest near the top, keeping in mind access to them needs to be as easy as possible. Don't forget that its possible to mount switches on the reverse side of a cabinet, which works well for SAN fabric switches, for example. KVM monitor/keyboard tray (if applicable) - roughly in the middle at a comfortable height for operators. These are actually the first thing we plan/place due to operator comfort/H&S being paramount. Tape Autoloaders or anything else that requires frequent operator access/intervention as part of its normal operation: roughly in the middle at a comfortable height for operators... which translates to directly just above or just below the KVM tray.

I can't say I'd want to get this. I mean £300 for imovie plus a few extras? no, thanks.

First question for me would be is this a deploy studio problem? or a general problem with transferring large files on your network, or a problem with transferring files to/from this particular client and/or server? How large is the image Are the ports on the switch for both the client and server running at the correct speed? Are they both on the fastest connections possible? Any errors on the switch(es)? How do large file transfers between this client and server go normally? Did you load the netboot image from the client too? If so how did that go? Can you do a "test" capture of a mac OSX client with no bootcamp image?

So you presumably write to each web designer and ask them what monitor they were using & what it was set at in terms of brightness, colour temperature, resolution, etc; plus what browser and plugins they had, and so-on? Because if you don't do all that then you're not really seeing the site the way the designer intended... I don't think the new Windows phone runs flash, does it?

I don't think that will be a problem. You create an account for yourself on a computer in your home (up to 10, I think I heard they were doubling the device limit). You upgrade that computer to Lion. It's upgraded, job done. Your wife doesn't need your itunes ID on her computer account on that machine to use Lion, it's not suddenly going to log her on in snow leopard or anything.

We're starting now and plan to go live in september 2012, but we have a very complex set of questions to answer in our migration and not as many resources as we would like to answer them.

Well the costs are replacing those things you use in the current setup. If you don't use much of CC3 (like us) then the cost to replace the functionality you use will be minimal. But one way or another, they exist. And don't discount the importance of the cost of your time. That's the one thing you can't really recover later if it turns out that things aren't going as smoothly as you hoped.

I thought Android copied that off windows for smartphones v5/v6 - I'm sure I had that functionality on my old htc hermes smartphone. And I'd be shocked if there wasn't other systems around prior to that which had it. There really is very little really "new" in this game.

I was going to reserve judgement until I had tried it. I don't know how well it will work but think its exciting that they're actually trying something different. People moan when Microsoft don't innovate and then they try something new and people... moan about that too. They can't win. I can see a use for these tiles to notify people of site or organisation-wide notices, to keep track of things like printer credits, rss news feeds (both external and from your own Intranet). Sure it might be horrible. It might also be fantastic. And I suspect it will be manageable in a corporate managed environment - business is their bread and butter after all.

You're right here. There's no cost saving in terms of licences in moving from CC3 to a "vanilla" XP network, if nothing else changes. You would however save the cost of a RM CAL if you combined this with moving to a much larger XP user base. The real potential for saving is what happens when you upgrade your network from Windows 2003/XP to 2008r2/win7 because those CC3 licences won't help you there if you go with CC4. In economics and business decision-making, sunk costs are retrospective (past) costs that have already been incurred and cannot be recovered. Sunk costs are sometimes contrasted with prospective costs, which are future costs that may be incurred or changed if an action is taken. Both retrospective and prospective costs may be either fixed (that is, they are not dependent on the volume of economic activity, however measured) or variable (dependent on volume). In traditional microeconomic theory, only prospective (future) costs are relevant to an investment decision. Traditional economics proposes that an economic actor not let sunk costs influence one's decisions, because doing so would not be rationally assessing a decision exclusively on its own merits. The decision-maker may make rational decisions according to their own incentives; these incentives may dictate different decisions than would be dictated by efficiency or profitability, and this is considered an incentive problem and distinct from a sunk cost problem. from: Sunk costs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The costs of moving to CC3 have already been accounted for. They shouldn't influence future decisions, beyond any "upgrade" reductions in CC4 licensing due to any upgrade pricing vs. fresh install pricing being taken into account when researching the price of a CC4 upgrade. There is a considerable cost in going vanilla from this, but then there still is a cost to going to CC4 - retraining, etc. We estimate the cost to us, of going from CC3 to vanilla as part of our CC4 upgrade, as being x at the most (that assumed we purchased KACE tools for imaging, which we have now chosen not to do). Our initial estimate of the likely cost of CC4 was 2*x. RM's actual quote to do the upgrade was 3*x. As a college rather than a school we may not be a typical RM customer and we may not be typical of a lot of people here, fair enough. But the financial implications here were something we could not ignore.

I think it is perfectly possible to do a CC3-->vanilla move within the current domain, and its also a perfectly valid model to migrate to a clean domain too but either way it depends how comfortable you are with AD. Either way you will be looking to either do a lot of hard work on a migration or a lot of hard work untangling the current domain. Something that might make your decision easier is thinking about the other services in your domain that rely upon domain services and the difficulty of migrating those to a new domain (and whether or not it is desirable to migrate them anyway, e.g. as part of an upgrade to these systems alongside your main network upgrade). Oh and think about how confident you are in the current health of your domain/forest as they stand now. If you think it is robust then that might suggest staying with what you have, and if you think it is problematic this might favour a migration. As @Norphy says, we've chosen to stay with our current domain/forest (we actually have a 2 domain forest with CC3 in the parent domain). I'd suggest there's a cost no matter what you do and its just a case of choosing where you are most comfortable with this cost hitting you. To stay within the current domain you will need to create a new OU structure and, I would suggest, a complete new set of GPOs. You'll obviously need to replace the GPOs that were in place for CC3, that goes without saying, but even for your own custom ones I would suggest starting again with fresh ones because the old ones will have been designed based on assumptions about your current environment. You then need to consider what will need to change with regards to user account settings (e.g. profile, etc) when you move them to the new OU structure and you'll need to create a 'test' network to test and practice the migration process. I'd also suggest that you must rebuild all the DCs rather than simply attempt to uninstall things. This is the easiest way to clean up the CC3 software/services that will be running on them - you can create new domain controllers to take over the DC functionality from the current CC3 DCs when the time is ripe, and its up to you if these are just temporary placeholders while you rebuild the RM DCs as "vanilla" DCs or if you want to just put new DCs into place anyway and leave them. Last but by no means least, don't forget that an XP --> windows 7 migration is a complex beast in and of itself, never mind all this extra detail! The impact of having to create new software installs, validate your current software library and obtain upgrades/replacements for stuff that won't run under windows 7, the direct impact of the migration (e.g. time spent schlepping around your site rebuilding machines with the new image and testing them), user training issues, etc. is a major project in its own right.

Director of Information systems (who also 'owns' the 6 person MIS department as well as us) -> Technical Services Manager -> Senior IT Systems Engineer (me) -> IT Systems Engineer -> Senior IT Support Technician -> 2x IT Support technicians.

And do what with it that they can't already do? This is no different to the info they can already gather by tracking your phone location with any phone, Apple or not, "Smart" or not, just by asking your provider. And I really do mean "no different" as the info gathered appears to be locations as plotted by phone tower, not by GPS. The info gathered is by no means accurate enough for that. Again, the info gathered is by no means accurate enough for that. It can be used to say you were in a certain area of town, maybe (so leave your phone behind before visiting the red light district). But it won't know which shops you went into. Again, given the accuracy problem this isn't a dead cert but sure it is a concern. One out of 4 ain't bad, as Meatloaf didn't say. But your rucksack didn't contain any other clues as to where you lived that wouldn't make you vulnerable to this problem if the bug in the phone was fixed? Because what you describe is by no means a new thing. Hopefully you'd be just as concerned to change your locks at home and get your keycard invalidated whether or not you lost your phone too. Because you should be. That article is based on a few key ideas that are incorrect. There *is* an issue here. It absolutely needs to be fixed. I'm not denying Apple have dropped a clanger here, they truly have. But lets be clear about what it is and what it is not. Looks like Android phones do something similar, though Google are a lot more sensible about how the data is kept/managed.

I'm somewhat amazed by the issues I've seen here. While I respect that others might have had other experiences and are certainly entitled to their opinions, it does sound like one or two people who have a major downer on one vendor. We've had very good experience with Stone over the years - there's an argument to be made that our support experience with them used to be "out of this world" and is now merely "bloody excellent" but we've been very happy with them for as long as I've worked here (12 years now, going back to when Stone were Cometdata). We've got about 1200 to 1400 machines here, and about 80/90% of them are Stone and I've been delighted with their overall 'package'. Decent quality products (not perfect, we have had a few bad batches of kit but these have been the sorts of problems that affected lots of OEMs, not just Stone) Good warranty Great support Good value (not the cheapest 'bottom line' price per unit, but when you consider the other matters they've always had the best overall "value" imho. knowledgeable staff at all levels who go out of their way to be helpful and, where needed, to work with you on finding a good solution a problem as opposed to merely "shifting boxes". Willing to supply eval kit. Currently going through buying another 72 laptops with them, and I am totally comfortable with that.

I'd be happy with the first and last words of that three word definition as a way of describing them. Doubly so with the driver issues you mention - Open source projects and the like aside, I'm happy enough to say that if a vendor's current software/hardware won't work with 64 bit windows 7 then its cheap crap by definition.

The mac pro server is still a toytown server. It's better specced than the macmini server but it's still not really that good. If I'm going to give up acres of rack space to something then its going to have to do a little better than no redundant power supplies and only 4 disks. They can call it a server all day and all night if they like but it still doesn't stack up to proper server hardware on many levels. I'm really quite pessimistic about the future of apple machines in business/educational networking given the idiotic decisions apple have been making lately. It remains to be seen if this new direction for Lion server is an amazing innovation or part of a goodbye to the datacentre on apple's part.

I've been running Exchange for years and been very happy with it. What I can say I guess might sound a bit woolly rather than being "techie" help but I think is still important: Firstly - be very clear about your objectives - Exchange is a "big" product, and if you're looking to implement it and then *only* use email then, to be honest, save your money and effort. Secondly - Hardware: Exchange is a "big" product as I say so you need to implement it whole-heartedly; planning to do it for both staff and students is a start in my book, but you need to also think about hardware - we run exchange for our college on two servers, with the mailbox store on a dedicated box with about 24Gb of ram and another box holding the CAS and Hub roles on another box... and I consider this the minimum that I'd be happy to run Exchange on (I'd consider another mailbox store for high availability, are you considering an Edge server?). This requires a fair amount of commitment to funding this hardware, and at least two exchange licences for a start. The CAS/HUB role will need decent multi-core processing capability, especially depending on the amount of connections you expect it to handle, email you expect to shift, any extra tasks you assign to this box, etc), SSL certificates, availability for mobile device support, etc. The database role will need planning too - the traditional exchange model calls for a couple of RAID spindles - both the database store itself and the log files need slightly different planning. This changes somewhat with both virtualisation and Exchange 2010's re-modelling of the information stores, but it still requires careful thought about what you're trying to do and a deployment that keeps this in mind. You should consider outsourcing your mail to 'the cloud' as has already been suggested; as much as I'm a big fan of Exchange, i'd consider live or gmail if I was implementing a greenfield email system for a school or college right now. However, you need to consider how email is used. Will it mainly be used internally (staff and students mailing each other)? Or externally (users emailing people outside the organisation)? If you're using it for internal use only, which I suspect is what most educational use is, then you need to consider the one weakness of outsourcing is that if your internet connection is unavailable then you lose access to your email, whereas you can keep using email with the internet connection down if the system is local. This isn't such a big deal for people who use it for external use, because if their internet connection is down then they can't email the people they need to either way. Having said that, if the internet connection is really reliable then this isn't such a big problem. As for other considerations about implementing Exchange - don't install it on a domain controller or you will regret it. Keep in mind that you will need to extend the schema of the domain/forest. This is well documented in the install steps, which you should follow carefully and understand before you even think about running the setup program.

We paid for Dell to set ours up, but we started with a very large VMWare ESX rollout with all the enterprise trimmings and an Equallogic SAN with all the salad that at the time was so new that the dell techie didn't know how to set it up. As we were on a very tight deadline, working with kit like that, and moving core business stuff over to it from day one then failure or having stuff offline a day or two longer than expected while I puzzle the manual out wasn't really an option.

Staff all sign the same AUP here and it covers these eventualities equally well, regardless of whether the staff member in question is a teacher, SLT member, IT person or caretaker.