Gongalong

We own the agreement. We have the MS Desktop Educational Pack. We can download it from the MS Licensing site, but it just gives the "call Microsoft" message under licensing. I could of course call Microsoft, but just curious as to whether anyone had already.

Hi folks, In a last ditch attempt at trying to resolve this problem I thought I'd post here just in case anyone has come across it (or can suggest anything). We have a Ganz Digimaster DR16H-DVD CCTV system. It's possible to access the device via ethernet, and it will serve the CCTV onto a webpage. For IE it installs an ActiveX control called "WebView Remote" (they appear in IE's add-ons twice as "WebView Control" and "WebViewer Control"). The control allows you to manipulate various things on the CCTV system e.g. select footage from a different date/time, so it's particularly useful. If you use another browser e.g. Chrome, Firefox, the functionality is much more limited. So for good or for bad IE is by far the best browser to use. The problem though seems to be the stability of this add-on. It works on a couple of PCs, but on the majority tested it crashes IE. I have tried recreating profiles, removing the control, and installing on new PCs with no solution - it still continues to crash. By chance has anyone come across this control, or have any suggestions on what I could try? (Ganz technical support haven't responded) TIA

Hi folks, We have a handful of PCs that connect to the County Council's SAP via Citrix. Our network sits behind the CC's Intranet. In the last few months the Citrix connection is dropping "randomly" once or twice a day, which is proving to be an irritation to the SAP users. (I don't know how sensitive Citrix is to a connection drop?) After several weeks of investigation via the CC they have said there is no problem on their side of the network. We use The Dude (network monitoring software) and have setup a ping to the SAP server (running at 20s intervals) but I've yet to stop a connection drop. Is there anything else we could do to monitor this and identify where the issue might be? (I guess I could drop the monitoring interval for starters...) TIA

Hi folks, Is there an RSS feed for the blog section? TIA

Saw it at BETT and it looks like a great system. Our librarians have been asked to look at eBooks and are panicking, but this looks like a great way to start simply without any huge investment. RM's support is rather hit and miss IME.

This would just be the ISO download from MS licensing.

I don't seem to be getting these at all. Instead there's the aforementioned message to call the Activation Centre. I did install Windows 8 on one test machine, but I can't remember whether it prompted for a key or not.

Hi folks, We have the educational licensing and I'm looking at just trying Windows 8 (and Office 2013). Both say that "The product you have selected requires a product key for product activation. To obtain your product key, please contact your local Product Activation Call Center at the telephone number provided here." Anyone know if this is an involved process and/or if these are single keys we can use across the site? (Why don't MS just provide a key, as with other products?) TIA

Oh well, that will teach me not to search Google news SunLive - Yahoo! email hacked again - The Bay's News First

Hi folks, Both myself and a couple of friends have got spam sent out from our Yahoo accounts over the last two nights. Having now been sensible and checked it shows login activity in Pakistan and Thailand. Yahoo even flags it as suspicious, but didn't send me an email, ironically. I can't seem to see a way to block this. Just wondering if anyone else had seen this, whether it's just a brute force attack, or if Yahoo themselves have leaked accounts? TIA

Perfmon is currently showing the following (running since yesterday): Avg. Disk Queue Length: Average = 0.060, Minimum = 0.000, Maximum = 0.545, Duration = 1:40 Avg. Disk Read Queue Length: Average = 0.126, Minimum = 0.000, Maximum = 0.919, Duration = 1:40 Avg. Disk Write Queue Length: Average = 0.028, Minimum = 0.000, Maximum = 0.188, Duration = 1:40 Current Disk Queue Length: Average = 0.160, Minimum = 0.000, Maximum = 4.000, Duration = 1:40 I have a feeling based on the durations though that this is just showing the last 100 seconds of data (viewing via the graph). As above, I've never used perfmon before.

Any recommendations on which SQL analysis tool to use, and what to monitor? Unfortunately I have zero knowledge in this area.

pete: I've got the graphical side of perfmon running (Average Disk Queue Length, Average Disk Read Queue Length, Average Disk Write Queue Length, Current Disk Queue Length). Is there anything else I should be doing? e.g. capturing the data to file (which I'm not sure how to do)

Thanks pete. I'll have a look. Curiously our CC's IT team also say this re. virtualisation, suggesting that other schools have had issues: While Capita supports virtualisation in principle, schools need to ensure that the machine hosting the virtual SIMS Host has the capabilities and performance required to run all virtual machines, whilst not compromising any machine.

Which begs the question, would there be that much difference in performance between 32 and 64 bit? We would have been running 32 bit on our previous physical SIMS server. I'm not well versed in server performance analysis e.g. where to check for network and disk performance bottlenecks, and I know even less about SQL server performance analysis. And perhaps it's just the case that our physical Hyper-V servers and/or SAN don't have enough oomph.

Well the difference in support being as per the previous blurb. Licensing's not an issue as we have Datacentre (or whatever it is that allows us to install any Server OS on a Hyper-V system).

This particular text is a little softer than what we were told before, which was basically that anything other than the recommended server OS was an unsupported environment, so we felt we had no choice, sadly. It's one of only two non-2008 R2 servers, the other of which is 2003 for some ancient MFL software.

I LOL'd It's probably a way of trying to push their hosted solution.

No, 2008 (R1) 32 bit. I quote our CC's IT department: Some schools have been in touch to ask why we only supports Windows Server 2008 Enterprise SP2 (32-bit) and not the later Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit). We do this to provide optimum support for schools. Our policy is to set up the SIMS Host as a dedicated server and a SIMS workstation. Setting up the server this way has several advantages: • More effective and efficient support which can isolate and establish whether a problem is caused by a network, a client or a software issue. • Some legacy SIMS modules are 16-bit and will not run on Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit) - which negates the advantages of the workstation set up. • SIMS itself is 32-bit, so there are no performance enhancements gained by installing a 64-bit operating system. • During upgrades it is sometimes required to access the SIMS client application - this saves the need to move to another machine. • During support and upgrades, it is sometimes necessary to reboot a server. If the server is used for other purposes and running other software, this affects all users (sometimes in the classroom) in addition to SIMS users. • If the server is not dedicated to SIMS, performance may be affected and conflicts can occur - making it more difficult and time consuming to isolate issues. Of course schools are free to make their own decision whether to follow our recommendations or install a 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008 onto the SIMS Host. However please be aware that, while you will still receive support from us, it may take longer to resolve some issues.

Thanks Edugeek, moderators, and all those who are on the forums. It's proven to be an invaluable resource :-)

Sorry to revive an old thread, but just to add... we're running 20 virtualised servers (Hyper-V), none particularly demanding other than our file server and SIMS, on two HP ProLiant DL385 G7s (2 * 8 core Opterons, with 72GB RAM) and an iSCSI HP MSA2312i SAN. SIMS itself is running on Win Server 2008 (32 bit), with four virtual processors, and 8GB of RAM. It's definitely under load, but not maxing out in terms of CPU and RAM at least. All the staff that used SIMS lots prior to the virtualisation say the performance has decreased from what was previously a 5-year old (tin) Dell server. Anyone else experienced a drop in performance with going to Hyper-V and managed to improve it?

Purely just whether you could view it as backup if one of the drives failed. I appreciate it offers little else in the way of backup. (More a theoretical situation than put into practice.)

Actually this answers the latter question at least: Why is raid 1 not a substitute for a backup - NAS-RAID-Technologies - Storage I suppose the question really is what you are trying to achieve from backup, and in most situations RAID 1 isn't going to cut it.

Hi folks, If I remove one of the two disks from a RAID 1 setup, can it be read in another system or will it only work connected to the controller? Could you view a RAID 1 setup as backed up in a sense? i.e. two complete sets of data on two separate disks. TIA

Certainly hard to pin down. - it only happens to staff and student accounts - it doesn't seem to be related to Ranger (with Ranger uninstalled I still get the crash) - it doesn't happen on administrative accounts (which can see the C: drive in Windows Explorer) - it doesn't happen in Chrome or Mozilla Although I'm wondering if your comment is sarcastic now that I think about it :-)