Psymon

Looks like either DNS has not got forwarders configured (right click server name in DNS, properties, forwarders) or that it hasn't got internet access to access these forwarders. The only other thing is something is preventing this query (firewall on server / hardware firewall on gateway?). Simon

I've seen this happen with content filters. Website is hosted at aol.co.uk / mail.aol.co.uk / whatever.aol.co.uk yet the content (images, CSS etc...) are hosted somewhere else so it gets blocked in the background. Had this with outlook.com after microsoft moved a lot of the actual content to "gfx.ms" and previously with hotmail as content was at "wlxrs.com". Simon

The reason I asked is because we currently have a really stable and reliable 2008R2 RADIUS setup as the backend to our wireless. We use it to push clients into certain VLANs (of which the BYOD VLAN has an ACL to only allow connections / ports to specified servers). I am in the process of setting up a 2012 RADIUS server - only for it to refuse access to all Windows 7 clients (yet allow Windows 8 without a problem, using the exact same wireless configuration, and exporting the settings from the working 2008R2 server / importing into the 2012 server). Can't quite work out what's going on - will shortly post on TechNet forums I think. Simon

MrWu - is this by any chance a Server 2012 NPS/RADIUS server?

It's not as bad as it sounds, but the cluster is then fully redundant from NIC failure, switch failure etc... If you have a NIC or switch die, you lose everything.

We have a setup similar to this 3 x HP BL480 Blades (2 x Intel Xeon Quad Core 2.66, 48GB RAM, 8 x 1GB NIC) HP P4300G2 2 node SAN (2 x 1GB Active / Active controllers per node - LeftHand do things differently than traditional SANs in that there is no head unit to manage comms, making it scalable) 2 x host, teamed and running on seperate modules in our core switch (10.0.0.x) 2 x iSCSI, MPIO not teamed as it's not supported (10.0.4.x) 4 x Hyper-V VMs, teamed and split 2/2 to seperatemodules in our core switch (10.0.0.x) Management and live migrations all go over the 2 x host adapters, iSCSI has it's own VLAN. As @Mr.Ben said - the MS deployment scenarios are massive clusters which is why they like to keep things seperate. Simon

We have a pair of Ruckus ZF7731s connecting an off-site building and it works a treat - it's only 100M away, and we get the full 190Mbps (which is apparently possible up to 1 mile). The pair of them, +3 years support / warranty was less than £2k ex VAT. Outdoor 802.11n Bridge AP (ZoneFlex 7731) | Ruckus Wireless Edit: as it's wireless, there are a lot less Line of Sight issues, it hasn't gone down once, and is powered by PoE at both ends . Simon

Personally - I would set up a second send connector (direct to MX) and test with that. You can keep your smarthost one set up, just temporarily disable smarthost, enable MX. See what results you get from that - will give you a better idea of what exactly the issue is. Si

I had a few issues using a smarthost for forwarding mail last year - so I decided to go direct to MX records with the exchange server. Only had a couple of small issues at the start (need a reverse lookup in your external dns etc...) but now it runs without fault, messages are queued by exchange (and viewable in the queue) when the other end has issues - as opposed to you not knowing till a lot later as the smarthost makes these decisions. Edit - users also get a message saying that the email has failed, but exchange will retry for 24 hours before generating a failure message etc... / our smarthost was blocked by hotmail as someone used it to spam = no emails to hotmail for a couple of days whilst they dealt with it.

HyperV 2008R2 only support allocating 4 cores to a VM - this answes one question. This won't make a difference as you are limited by CPU - what's the memory utilization on thie MIS host? Are you using dynamic memory? You cannot over-allocate CPUs anyway - it still only uses the CPUs from the host server (it cannot use other hosts CPU power as well - even if clustered etc...). Alternatively you look at upgrading your hosts - Server 2008R2 - 4 virtual processors, and up to 64 GB of memory on a virtual machine Server 2012 - 64 virtual processors, and up to 1 TB of memory on a virtual machine Useful 2008R2 vs 2012 PDF - http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/C/A/2CA38362-37ED-4112-86A8-FDF14D5D4C9B/WS%202012%20Feature%20Comparison_Hyper-V.pdf Simon

We tend to just archive everything older than 0 days (everything) to a .pst file. Give them a copy of this - it's their business if they want to put it back into the cloud.

Does this happen on all machines or just yours? Could be an "ipconfig /flushdns" resolves your issue as the stale record is cached on your machine. If not, maybe a static record is in DNS that is causing your problems? "nslookup" is your friend.

Could just be that you are missing the spaces. Try echo. > C:\installing.txt When I ran your code in CMD I get nothing, when I put the spaces in it's fine.

Sounds like this - you said in the post you have an NVIDIA Quadro, yet ATI Catalyst is for an ATI graphics card. Simon

This could be that you do not have the correct NIC driver in the install.wim image - so the boot.wim is happy, until the machine gets to the OOBE and realises there is no NIC driver. Check device manager after a failed install. Also you could try this laptop using any other switch (that you know works) - this will tell you wether it's the switch, or the machine.

You do not need a 2k8 server or a schema upgrade - you only need a Windows 7 machine with RSAT installed, and the Group Policy Preferences update installed on your XP / Server 2003 machines. When you then manage group policy on your DC from the Windows 7 PC you get the extra options. You may also need to copy the ADMX \ ADML files over to your SYSVOL share.

Quoted from - Plan to Deploy Data Deduplication

Speaking of server 2012, if you have it installed somewhere you can copy the deduplication files and run them on one of your production severs (no matter what version of server it is running) and it will tell yout he potential savings from migrating this server to 2012 and taking advantage of the deduplication.

You could search the drive for last modified date on all files - then sort by that field. You should be able to get rid of stuff that is 3+ years old without any issues (providing the users are happy it's useless). Si

There is an option called "Delete All" in GPP which you can just put at No.1 in the order, that way when the user logs into any machine it removes all printers, then re-installs the ones required.

I found that 98%people successfully got printers correctly installed at first logon - so if someone did have a problem with printers, I recommend they log off/on again. It seemed more reliable than a refresh every 1 hour, with an 8 hour working day there were 8 chances of it messing up your printers.

I have had this one before - group policy refreshes in the background and removes the printer. You need to enable this setting, it removes printers from the refresh. [COMPUTER POLICY\ADMINISTRATIVE TEMPLATES\SYSTEM\GROUP POLICY\Printers preference extension policy processing]

When you did an autodiscover on the iSCSI configuration it must have picked up this drive as available - you should be able to remove it from the iSCSI Initiator. It should appear under "Discovered Targets" which you can disconnect it, it's also likely to be present in "Volumes and Devices". Simon

Another vote for KMS, we use it for Office and Windows. As withthe other posters, 180days is more than enough. S

Version 5.5.0.12834 was released on 27th June - problem has been fixed Simon