Asreal

Hi Mr Hicks, thanks for responding so quickly! iSCSI: Yes it's attached to our main core switch along with *everything* else on the network, but my predassessor had put it on a 192.168.x network rather than what the rest of the school are on. (It could be someone bringing something in from home that defaults to a 192.168 address? That's actually something I'm going to look at now that you mention it...) Patching: Is it part of a Xen update or seperate patch? While you're on, do you know if there are any network monitoring tools/logs that are part of the XenCenter console? Thanks again for getting back to me - at least I've got a direction to start in.

Hi all, resident newbie here ashamedly only logging in when I want something from the wise-folk, I hope you none of you are offended! Okay the situation: After experiencing the usual horrors that can only occur during the first few weeks of September, things had (finally) started to calm down to an almost pleasant "mildly annoying" level. Then, we reach this afternoon and each of our Windows Servers seemingly just grind to a halt and die one by one. There didn't seem to be any particular order to this; we get initial reports of the Internet being a bit slower than normal (during the morning), then we lose Internet connectivity altogether, file server starts to die (still pingable, but not able to remote in), followed by the rest (DC, DHCP etc etc). We had had this problem once before, I'd tried: * testing for broadcast storms: - We have a switch that has a handy little LED display that shows network utilisation, we plug this into our core switch and begin unplugging fibre modules to see if we can narrow down cabinets with high sources of traffic - no luck * testing extrernal access - plugged a laptop (static IP/GW) directly into our router could access T'Internet fine * rebooting virtual servers: - tried doing this via a remote session only to find that all my existing remote sessions (open near permanently) had died - tried accessing the console in XenCenter itself only to find that it was barely responsive and would not let me in - initially did a (nice) shutdown on said servers to try and minimise any damage - afer waiting 30 mins, gave up and did a force shut down (which worked quite quickly) - Linux (web) servers seemed unaffected and would happily let me shut them down from the console without any problems Only shutting everything down and rebooting our hosts and slowly bringing everything else back up seemed to work. This I had to do today, but don't relish the idea of doing it again... * possibilities - hardware is fairly new (hosts: Dell Poweredge R710's SAN: Dell PowerVault MD6300i), but we only have ONE iSCSI port plugged in (this is how I inhereted it, I want to get the other plugged in but don't know enough about this yet to try - thet "if it works/worked don't change it (yet)" mentality etc. I understand that it has worked like this for ages...) - we are running XenCenter 6.0.2 and due to update it soon, but I can't see as this would affect anything that majorly (not after we've already been using it for so long) Any ideas of where I should start? Thanks in advance!!

Hi all, resident newbie here ashamedly only logging in when I want something from the wise-folk, I hope you none of you are offended! Okay the situation: After experiencing the usual horrors that can only occur during the first few weeks of September, things had (finally) started to calm down to and almost pleasant "mildly annoying" level. Then, we reach this afternoon and each of our Windows Servers seemingly just grind to a halt and die one by one. There didn't seem to be any particular order to this; we get initial reports of the Internet being a bit slower than normal (during the morning), then we lose Internet connectivity altogether, file server starts to die (still pingable, but not able to remote in), followed by the rest (DC, DHCP etc etc). We had had this problem once before, I'd tried: * testing for broadcast storms: - We have a switch that has a handy little LED display that shows network utilisation, we plug this into our core switch and begin unplugging fibre modules to see if we can narrow down cabinets with high sources of traffic - no luck * testing extrernal access - plugged a laptop (static IP/GW) directly into our router could access T'Internet fine * rebooting virtual servers: - tried doing this via a remote session only to find that all my existing remote sessions (open near permanently) had died - tried accessing the console in XenCenter itself only to find that it was barely responsive and would not let me in - initially did a (nice) shutdown on said servers to try and minimise any damage - afer waiting 30 mins, gave up and did a force shut down (which worked quite quickly) - Linux (web) servers seemed unaffected and would happily let me shut them down from the console without any problems Only shutting everything down and rebooting our hosts and slowly bringing everything else back up seemed to work. This I had to do today, but don't relish the idea of doing it again... * possibilities - hardware is fairly new (hosts: Dell Poweredge R710's SAN: Dell PowerVault MD6300i), but we only have ONE iSCSI port plugged in (this is how I inhereted it, I want to get the other plugged in but don't know enough about this yet to try - thet "if it works/worked don't change it (yet)" mentality etc. I understand that it has worked like this for ages...) - we are running XenCenter 6.0.2 and due to update it soon, but I can't see as this would affect anything that majorly (not after we've already been using it for so long) Any ideas of where I should start? Thanks in advance!!

Thanks btw folks; has been a great help! Rumour has it that some of our extreme switches have had their IPs configured manually - anyone had to do this very much?

NP! You're asking thing's I've missed (Plus, I'm glad it's not just me!)

Okay guys, newbie question for the geniuses: Situation: New broadband installation is imminent, only I have been told that because our new firewall & filtering is hosted externally (by new ISP) I am going to have change our entire network address range so that it doesn't conflict with another schools network. (Never thought this would be a problem being a private range, how wrong I was...) Question: For someone who's never done anything like this before, what's the best way of going about making all of these changes? Are there any things I need to really watch out for? Any advice anyone could give would be much appreciated!

You're telling me! We literally only have a week or two to sort it out (my first job as the NWM leaves - oh the joy!) I agree with you 100% about the complete package; it's my first time doing this and I'd like it as neat (and as quick) as possible. Email we host ourselves at least, so it is only the broadband and filtering we have to worry about... "but then again we did it for eight schools" ... my god! Why!? Schools Broadband seems popular so far (we've had a quote). Can I ask, which were the other contenders? RE Our other provider: Our current situation equates to too many schools all being on the same line (I think we're on a 1GB pipe when it should be 2GB?), our proxies having to be rebooted several times a day as we fight the other schools for the connection. This has being going on for months now and we don't seem to be getting anywhere - the contract is up so we're looking elsewhere! I think they've resigned themselves to the fact we're doing this...

Okay, I'm guessing I've posted this in the wrong thread! (Sorry folks!!) I'm reminded of this relevant xkcd: xkcd: Wisdom of the Ancients So, to avoid the above xkcd, here's my own noddy "I'm changing broadband" checklist, with baby-esque explanations which seems to sum up what I've found out so far: When buying new broadband we need to consider: • Firewall (CISCO is mentioned a lot here, expensive but reliable) • Router hardware (CISCO is mentioned a lot here, expensive but reliable) • Internet Filtering (e.g. Smoothwall, Bloxx, Lightspeed) This can come from a different company and certain suppliers will focus only on providing broadband only, so you may well end up with different company anyway. • SLA (How long they will take to fix it if there is a problem) • Backup lines to take over incase a tractor runs over your fibre line (ADSL or FTTC – these usually have no SLA/fix time) • Your “Front-facing” IP addresses : The IP addresses you have on display on the actual web so that they can see you; the important ones are email (especially if you host it yourself) and websites. RIPE provide the IP addresses for the UK and being as all the IPv4 addresses have run out, they will argue if you are using anything unnecessary. The only thing you need are addresses that use the same port, such as two websites (so mysite.co.uk and youremailwebclient.mysite.co.uk for instance). Everything else they might argue that you (or your provider) uses NAT to get around the problem. • How long it will take to do the install (the lead-time). - This is a biggie!! If you don't get it booked in in time then you could find yourself without an Internet connection (or being forced to renew a crappy service!). For instance, our current Broadband contract ends in March (it currently being November); most suppliers say it will take 90 days just to install the Fibre. Then you have to factor in Christmas holidays and it being a busy time of year – we were told to get it sorted *now*. Updated for the sake of it

There are plenty of options around; I'm in Walsall in the West Midlands!

Hi folks, I've occasionally lurked this site on and off, but this is the first time I've really needed to ask anything myself, so I hope this is in the right place and I'm not offending anyone by replicating a thread that may be just over the page... Situation: My Network Manager is leaving and I'm stepping up into the role having spent years as an ordinary tech in a 2 man department. The main problem is that our Internet contract is up in March and we *need* to move away because the service is shockingly bad. I've never had to do this sort of thing before so I'm feeling just a tad bewildered. I wanted to ask if there a standard procedure for moving away from one broadband service to another? What sorts of things do I need to do (move domains over, open ports etc) and what can I expect? Any suggestions, links or just general hand holding anyone could give me would be *really* appreciated!

LOL Liam! beat me to it!

It's not bad, it's funny! Is why Tom & Jerry worked so well.... Rainbow anyone? =) YouTube - RAINBOW kids tv show 70`s very rude

Great post! Thanks for putting it up =)

Some fantastic ones here folks, pure genius Here are mine: Manual Override: Keep saying "But I need it!" upon being told work cannot be done with 20 minutes notice Relentless: After having busy IT staff reluctantly agree to look at your home machine "when they have time", proceed to appear in their office at every break, lunch or free period until they crack or tell you to piss off Conscientious: Helpfully backup all your music/video files to the school servers until there is no more space

Very handy!! Thanks very much ^_^

I occasionally spend a few days every now and then doing what Zag said: The 'Photographs' folder is always one to target with digital cameras defaulting to taking shots (unlikely to be used for promotion/print purposes if ever) too big to fit on the screen that can be anything from 2 - 5mb. My own rule of thumb is to resize the image so that it can fit on the screen (or to around 800k-ish), as such I've got actions and batch conversions setup in photoshop to do this for me en masse (open file > scale down to 30% > save/close etc). Video clips are another beauty. These I'll encode as divx's with Super- (again, you can do batches) the only problem with doing all this is that it ties up your machine. The other one is massive Word documents - people inserting said 2mb images into a Word doc without resizing them first. The worst offenders I open up, go format > compress all pictures - but this is annoying because you can't do it by the batch =./

Does it happen like this in safe mode? It may be as Arthur suggests, a graphics glitch, does it happen with all the pretty menu's disabled? Is there anything stated in the error logs?