Roberto

*grin* when was the last time you ever saw me recommend 3rd party admin middleware for OS X either ;-) Fair point. Though I'd make the same arguement for/against Karoshi that I did for CC3; if you want just about everything it offers and can't put it together yourself with the resources to hand then go for it. If you can and will be customising whatever baseline you get quite heavily because none of them quite meet your needs then they all start to look like poor value (even Free software, unless your time is worthless). We spend far to much time fighting CC3 where I am, because we're trying to go in a different direction from the direction it wants us to go. I've actually just distributed a paper at work discussing "the future of our network" where I talk about things, and I describe our use of CC3 as trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. And as I pointed out in this paper, it isn't the fault of either the peg or the hole that this doesn't work.

Welcome! There will be a lot of opinions on this one, many of them are going to be polar opposites to each other. Someone has mentioned already that CC3 is a "love it or hate it" kinda thing and I'd agree. Of those two groups, I'm very firmly in the latter camp. Having said that, if you don't have a lot of on-site support, if you're struggling to get things going, and you don't need to deviate substantially from RM's standard deployment, it will probably work well for you. When I talk about deviating from their standard, someone mentions adding your own stuff on top of what CC3 provides (e.g. own mail service, etc.) working fine and I'd agree with that. If you want to buy an end to end solution from RM, or want to buy CC3 and layer your own stuff on top then you'll be fine. Probably spending a lot more money than somone who does it all themselves, but you'll be fine. As much as I'm personally not a fan, I understand how this may well be the best option for you to support learning at your school and that is why we're all here. Making changes to what CC3 tries to provide in and of itself doesn't end so well. The last sentence there is why of my dislike for it; we purchased it when it was new, tried to adapt it to our needs, and broke our teeth on it. If you look at it and think "ooh it nearly does what we want, maybe we can buy it and just make our adjustments...." then my advice would be to run, not walk, away from the deal. I hope that helps. You've certainly picked a thorny topic as part of your opening salvo! rob

If only educational software was compatible But that's a question you'll need to ask yourself about Vista as well. If you upgrade in the expectation that the 14 year old bit of software your maths department purchased from "Dogs barking in the background whenever you phone up the cottage in Wales for support" software LTD, and which was widely regarded as awkward to set up in its prime will work just fine with Vista, you'll be disappointed. As Geoff notes, you may well get better results on a Mac or Linux with WINE. Of course, anything that helps you to ensure that you have the correct amount of licences is a good thing, no matter what the result to your bottom line. It's one thing to decide you don't like the terms of use for a piece of software and take your business elsewhere, but obviously if you decide to use an item of software then you need to ensure you have paid the correct amount to do so. Actually I know we're all well aware of that, and its usually teaching staff and managers who seem to think paying for software is an interesting optional thing to do occasionally, so this will help you explain to others that no, you "can't just" and that people really should take things seriously. On a slightly different note, it seems I'm not the only one that thinks Mr Thurrot talks out of where WGA was designed either..

Well that'll work. I'd rather be using a Mac myself but its all good.

Well as Mr Thurrot has been full of it in the past on various issues, I don't trust his opinion as fact any more than I trust my own opinion or anyone else's. He isn't an authority on the subject is what I mean to say. I don't know anyone who mis-undestood the intent of the XP licence in the way they talk about there but a lot of people seem to misunderstand the new terms to mean what they actually say. I need to find the time to read the EULA for that sometime. I simply don't trust Microsoft when it comes to licence issues. Do you?

Seen some quiet interesting stuff about the retail licence, which I've blogged about here. Long story short, if you purchase a retail licence, you can only move it once from one system to another once, and thats your lot. And keep in mind that Microsoft's de-facto definition of 'system' is 'motherboard'. I wonder if we'll see anything similar in the campus / select agreements. They can't be serious surely?

run mailbox cleanup on the storage group in question then right-click the mailbox, and one of the options will be to re-connect the mailbox to an account. Take that as a suggestion, and follow the suggestion.

I think sometimes we forget that while virtualisation has been around a while, it was a pretty static thing for a lot of that time with no real new developments. We're really not that far out of "The miracle isn't how well the bear dances, but that it dances at all" territory.

it does, doesn't it. Not freelancing but the college might be persuaded to rent me out for a day if its asked in the right way. I think its a good principle though, to pick your own consultants who you can be sure have aims at least vaguely aligned with yours, I get suspicious when i have people thrust onto me whose aims I can't work out.

Strikes me that a good thing to do on your part might be to agree with them but specify your own insultant. One that would work with you on what to do, so that you got up to speed quickly on what you needed to support the darn things yourself. One that doesn't have a vested interest in selling you more of their time. Where to find someone like that is another question of course.

Nothing in the client event logs on one of the 'named' workstations?

I can only echo the advice you've had already. And maybe add a little of my own. I've found that you really need to boot from a seperate OS image for absolute best results in cloning, and for my last batch of deployments (Intel iMac machines with a ~50 Gb image footprint) I did the following: 1. Got hold of a 200Gb firewire external disk, partitioned it into a small (30Gb) first partition and a second partition using the rest of the space. 2. Installed OS X onto the first partition on this external disk - you can do this easily enough with a normal install, and just be careful about selecting the destination as the firewire disk. I also do a custom install at this point so I don't waste time installing stuff that won't be used on this image. 3. Install NetRestore from Mike Bombich's site onto this firewire based OS install. ~~ you only really need to do these 3 steps once, and it will work for you as it is until you substantially change the hardware you're imaging from and need to update the OS to work with the new hardware ~~ 4. With that done, create your source disk image on the Mac you want to take an image from. 5. When ready boot from the firewire disk (you can change the startup disk in system preferences), use netrestore to create an image of the system disk and copy to the second partition on the firewire disk as an ASR .dmg file. 6. Go to coffee. This is perhaps far more complex than you can 'get away with' but doing it this way guarantees that i'll have no trouble when I'm doing this. The only things you need to change afterwards are IP address (if you don't use DHCP) and network name - actually the Macs will work out their own names that don't clash, but you might want to change them to something more standard.

Before. With AD you always extend the schema and allow these changes to replicate before installing the object that will be using the extended schema.

FreeBSD for me No shocks here either. If I'd ended up as OS/2 then they'd be hurting tho'

Let's clarify one thing. You say "given to". Does that mean that they will be the owners of these laptops? Or do you mean they'll be the property of the school / LEA / whatever and will be issued to students? If the latter, then just make them normal clients on your network, with whatever minimal compromises might be needed in order to allow users to work locally off the network. No need to make them admins, no need to set up dual boot or any other complex scenarios, no problem at all.

Glad to hear you say that. NTBackup is without a doubt the most foolproof tool for backing up Exchange. I've been working with Exchange since Exchange 4.0, and I've never found a better way of doing it. Lots of ways that people think are better sure. They usually tell me all about them for conversation when I'm doing a consulting job on the side recovering their exchange server from improperly configured backups.

Nope, no users in the same domain as the Exchange servers here. Works fine. No trouble at all.

I don't know if SBS sets this automatically (the next post suggests not) but all my OWA installs have always done this with no problem. It's a very simple case of configuring the authentication settings for teh exchange subwebs correctly in IIS.

1) Have you enabled IMF on the SMTP Virtual Server? 2) You've 'sanity-checked' the settings on the IMF filter page to make sure your values for filter to junkmail and for gateway blocking are sane in relation to each other (e.g. you're not delivering and routing to junkmail folders at a higher priority than you're trying to discard mail).

That's pretty cool Ross.

If the Macs are a new thing for you then it's just a case of bedding them in with yourselves and the users, and managing expectations (maybe the enviornments are different but here we'd manage that CD burning problem away by making sure iTunes worked and then telling them to use that or do without.

As Alessandro says, Wireshark is a good free (and Free) tool, but even with the expensive tools that claim to be able to diagnose bits and pieces, you really do need an experienced eye giving the system a look over. If your whole network is slow and you're sure you've purchased the right equipment then something odd is obviously going on across the whole network and it may well be beyond simple fixes.

I'd ask this too. The answer might prove quite important in finding something they think fixes the problems...

Robertmoir.com blog The MacBook is the best platform for running Vista RC1 that I've seen so far. I find that funny on many levels.

Does Freedos count for a competetive upgrade for Windows licences then? I really don't see how returning the software, with or without a refund, helps tho.