mistersparky

Hey there everyone, Our school network is running around 600 clients, with 16 servers – 4 physical, and 12 virtual. The servers are, or at least were all 2003 or 2008, with all Dcs all running 2008. We are making relatively good progress on a project to rollout Windows 7. As part of this, there is quite a lot of backend stuff that we need or would like to do, upgrade AD Schema, raise AD domain functionality level, replace as many of the 2003 servers as possible, upgrade the DCs to 2008r2 and introduce some newer technologies and features such as DFS. As part of all of this, i’ve been thinking a little bit about the actual use and number of servers in our domain. There seems to be some a good number of considerations and implications for this. For example, how much does one try to separate various services and software - at what point are the gains in management and redundancy outweighed by extra costs considerations (hardware, licensing, power ect). How many servers is “too many”? What about how to go about mixing and matching various services and software? is it good to separate 3rd party software from Windows services or even themselves? What are suitable services to run on DCs? (KMS comes to mind). What about Windows services that run best on a dedicated server (Exchange being a good example). I’d love to hear any thoughts and feedback on this, in particular how your own servers are setup, and how you would go about setting them up if building your network again from scratch. (bit of a general topic, I did have a quick look for similar topics but didn’t find anything too similar, apologies in advance if I missed any useful, recent and similar threads)

Hey there! We are running a mixture of Windows (2003-2008R2) servers both physical and virtual. The virtual environment is ESX 3.5 (we are planning on upgrading over the summer). On top of this, we have an HDS AMS2100 SAN. We have a number of SAN LUNs assigned to our virtual servers. However, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of consistency in how this is done. Some are mapped directly through the OS, some are configured through VMware as RAW device mappings, and some are configured as VMware virtual disks on datastores mapped to the VMware environment. What are the pros and cons of each approach for both OS and data drives?

Hey there everyone. A big and somewhat delayed (Exchange 2007 issues have been taking up a lot of time over the last two weeks) thanks to everyone for providing some excellent ideas and suggestions. I managed to put something together and present it to senior management a couple of weeks ago. More than one person suggested looking through the school’s development plan. This was a remarkable good and simple idea that I had overlooked. It turns out that ICT is absolutely key to a number of points on the plan, and closely tied to many others. I ended up including 3 relatively specific and technical points as part of my presentation (Windows 7 Deployment, ongoing hardware replacements/lifecyles, mobile devices and VDI), and then included a general point about continuing to develop and improve ICT provision at the school. I then finished off by talking about the SIP, and how the points I had raised and ICT in general would help achieve this. The presentation seemed to go down well, with some good feedback and questions at the end. Thanks again to everyone for helping out with this!

Hey there everyone! I’m a couple of months in on the position of network manager at a local secondary school. It’s my first network manager post, after a number of years of various technical support roles in education. The job is going fantastically well, with lots of interesting tasks and new challenges that keep me learning, busy and enthused on a daily basis. I will soon be meeting with the schools senior management to talk about my “Vision for technical support of ICT” at the school. I have a few things lined up that I plan to talk about, Windows 7 deployment, VDI, mobile devices and so on. However, all of these are relatively technical and specific. I am concerned that maybe I am missing something truly aspirational, an actual “Vision”. Does your department or institution have a “Vision for ICT”? If so, is it something you have had to formally write or present? If not, is it something you would ever like to draw up and establish? Thanks in advance for any thoughts or feedback with this!

Thanks for the reply. Just to confirm, the computers in question are currently not in any Computer lists. I am trying to delete them from the OD Master using a domain admin account. When attempting to delete them from the All Records tab, I am doing so from the Computers list.

As title, I am having some issues with deleting computer records from Workgroup Manager. While authenticated as a directory administrator, I select a record and delete it. If I then close and re-open WGM, the records have re-appeared. They sometimes even re-appear when moving between the different category tabs (Users, Groups and so on). I have also tried deleting the computer records from the All Record Types tab, when enabling “Show ‘All Records’ tab and inspector” in WGM preferences. This results in the same behaviour when attempting to delete the records as above. Thanks in advance for any ideas or suggestions with this issue.

Slightly delayed thanks for the replies and suggestions. Picking out specific comments for a few replies: We have had all sorts of issues with creating, saving and editing Logic files via network shares and locations. Prety much the only way around this was to ensure that all Logic files were created and edited from the local drive (copying to and from network shares), hence the need for treating the Music directories different to the other directories. Bingo! That was exactly what I was after. I have put it in place and its working great. I don’t think I was a million miles away, I think I was just slightly different POSIX settings. Thanks very much for the solution.

Hey there everyone! Long-time reader, first time poster. We are running the usual AD-OD integrated Mac network with around 20 clients, pretty much exclusively for our Music department. Most things are working OK and have been for a year or so, but there are two things I have having problems getting to grips with. We have had a lot of problems using Logic from network shares, and in turn all recording work is saved and accessed from local disks. In the local home drive, all the directories except Music and Movies are redirected to server user shares. Therefore, anything that’s saved in, say, the Documents directory of the home folder saves straight to the server, where as anything saved in Music or Movies directories is saved locally. In addition to this, we have shortcuts on the desktop for users Music and Movie directories, so that users can copy recording work to and from their server user directory. However, what we don’t have is a shortcut for users local home directories on the desktop - they have to access it from finder favourites, or create their own. Is there any simple way to add this for particular groups and users, either via an OD setting or script? Second of all, we have a couple of network shares that are published to certain usersgroups via the “Items” tab in OD preferences. The first of these is a share to distribute work to students, RW for staff and RO for students. This works very well with no problems. The second user share is, or at least is supposed to be a drop box. What we would really like to do is allow students to copy work to this share, but not to be able to edit or delete any files or folders once they are there (whether their own or otherwise). Ideally, we would also like to prevent students from accessing any work there, again whether their own or otherwise. I’m really struggling on the proper set of permissions to achieve this. Thanks in advance for any help or advice with either of these issues.