SYNACK

Try using an external dns server on your devices rather than a router/modem one as dns usually cooks on home routers due to lack of memory and bad optimisation (if you don't already)

Um, lets keep this civil shall we before it moves too far away from being a discussion

Nightmare or impossible to get extra IPs here depending on ISP and technology, stuff like DSL and it is impossible without a whole separate connection just for an IP. Certs are still $300-$400 minimum per year that actually work with more than a couple of browsers, that may seem small to you but it is just another cost making these 'free' services like Office365 not actually free, it becomes very difficult once the school has been sold by advertising on the 'free' nature of something to then turn around and get them to fork out $300 per year on SSL and more (maybe $70 per month) for an additional IP, $100 to get student advantage actually activated, and then time to design a VLE or something useable in a school in SharePoint. We are still doing that but it is an uphill battle when money keeps getting involved for these things on a (promoted as) free service.

You just need a single cert for exchange and you can remap everything to go through mail.whatever.org.country it is not ideal but doable. You can even stack ADFS and exchange all on the same ssl cert and external ip but it is quite a hack so it's much better to spend the extra stack of money to make it work as MS intended (with no regard to how non-fourtune 500 companies get their internet).

my high horse is higher than your's, I drug it myself and strain its farts through a calcium carbide and water C0^2 filter along with feeding it lean lettuce and lead free grass to make sure it is carbon neutral and safe to use in underground tunnels

I agree thorium is no magic bullet and it can all be made into weaponised nukes with a bunch of work. I was more looking at the micro-reactor tech that is much safer due to smaller amounts of everything and the continual containment for the lifespan of the reactor thanks to not needing to change out the fuel. Of course there are still all sorts of issues and waste and overall I would be happier if most of the stuff ran on rechargeable renewable like I described in my post earlier but there should still be a place for nuclear if only for science and exploration. The use of deep space probes is becoming tenuous thanks to the lack of easily accessible uranium for thermal reactors. Stuff like the voyager probe would be difficult now thanks to not only the fear but also the shortage of material. Its thermal reactor allow it to keep running a large distance from the sun where solar panels would not work and stuff like the first mars rovers were crippled and lost because of their sole reliance on solar and battery. We should be using the clean renewable tech as much as possible but we should not close off other avenues of progress incase we miss something great or loose the ability to explore or progress. Fire was and is dangerous too but we have learned to harness it reasonably safely. Whether the human race as a whole is evolved enough to harness nuclear tech safely is another matter but without it we are giving up all sorts of opportunities and potentially offsetting scientific progress by hundreds of years while we get something better. If everyone had decided to stop using coal to fuel the industrial revolution and decided to wait till we had ubiquitous hydro electric and wind power how far would humanity have come and would any of us have clean power at all. As with anything, there is a balance to be struck between caution and progress. Or I could get all SciFi and quote Babylon 5 "Who are you? and What do you want?".

2k8 does not support type 2 VMs and can't emulate EFI, you would need hyper-V 2012 R2 to allow for VHDX and EFI which should let you do this. It is worth moving platforms for a bunch of reasons as 2012 R2 makes 2008 look like a steam engine resource efficiency wise for stuff like disk reads and network throughput let alone memory dedupe. At any rate, it should be perfectly possible with up to date VM tools. Windows 8 Pro/Enterprise does support Hyper-V and so you can probably even do it fine with that if you are not ready to upgrade the rest of your infrastructure yet.

What VM system are you using, unless using something like Hyper-V 2012 R2 in a type 2 configuration that supports EFI it simply won't work as it is looking for the modern hardware, emulated or otherwise. Thanks to server backup you'll probably need a D: partition too.

I would go from 2003 to 2010 to 2013 then enable hybrid, there is no direct path from 2003 to 2013 without a bunch of downtime and hassle for you and users. Biggest thing with ADFS is certificates and IP addresses, you need an external IP assigned to a DNS name you have a cert for, generally best to just get a wildcard cert if you can swing it.

@jamesbmarshall - WTG without the need for a $100 USB stick would be truly useful and awesome for BYOD, a WTG VHD that could be dumped on a BYOD tablet and booted to that connected to O365 or something to authenticate it was licenced would be epic. A tablet with a big, expensive, power hungry and fragile school owned USB stick hanging out of the side of it is simple ridiculous. The only thing holding it all back is obscenely crazy licencing conditions, MS has gone this far, why not that one step further to make it really useful for BYOD. (Even a VHD on a microSD would be a massive step in the right direction).

Not vastly cleaner but if dealt with properly much less likely to sink us all under the ocean or have us all dyeing from prehistoric viruses released from the no longer existing ice caps and perpetuated by the nice warm, rainforest everywhere climate. Compared to fossil fuels nuclear actually has far less chance of killing us all than the continued use of filthy peek power plants burning coal in places like the US and China. I like to wine as NZ is basically all hydroelectric and wind byt we do get the lovely occasions every so often where it has not rained enough in a while and the countries batteries are low... something that does not happen is major manufacturing economies, we also export a stack of coal and cope to be burnt in the steel furnaces of places like China and Korea so despite our own systems we are not really helping, especially with all the oil and gas exploration going on so we can be grateful to let a US company mess the environment, take 95% of the profits and the oil and leave us with 4% and almost certainly higher fuel prices. As a measure of hypocrisy, I eat meat, mostly Chicken and fish but still, and happily enjoy the #$%^ out of driving my 2.8L 4WD sports saloon car. It does not mean that I don't want cleaner safer energy like that provided by micro nuclear reactors, solar (grapheme based or otherwise) and definitely fusion but I still want to enjoy the chunk of life I have left as well. Personally I would like my government to invest in the simple renewable capacity harvesting tech, like pumping water back up the hydro dams with extra solar capacity for use during the non-generating times and to regulate solar payback so we got a subsidy and got paid back at decent rates rather than paying consumer rates for power used and only getting paid back at industrial smelter rates, about 1/10 payback from the grid opposed to what we pay. There are also stupid regulations where you can't generate more than x amount of power or you have to be registered and taxed as a power company. I would love for all of this stuff to be possible but no one in our government system is selling sense, coming up to our election we have the main parties, the we'll help unions, teachers and a select group of minorities party at the cost of fiscal stability, the we'll actually keep the country solvent and treat everyone unfairly equally party (actual democracy despite the wineing) and the collection of we have one good idea and several hundred bat-excrement crazy ideas parties. Unfortunately the ecological ones are in this group so they have a few decent policies but never make the appropriate value judgments to stop at greener policies and not delve into psydoscience, fear and random enforcement of vegetarian hippy train-riding fetishes. As anyone who has tried public transport in NZ knows, it is a great way to show up damp, exhausted, deaf and an hour an a half late to anything you were actually going to.

Nice, maybe a segment for your next book, 'Rebuilding after the apocalypse'

+1 but thorium micro breeder reactors will never happen thanks to decades of uninformed fear and the persisting use of 1950s tech for nuclear generation. Germany were the shining light in this but have now gone all renewable so that is pretty much done. It stuffs spacecraft too. Now we need to wait for fusion if that happens with governments cutting funding left and right while subsidising oil companies and taxing oil themselves effectively adding to the price but using half of it to pay off the oil companies along with tacit acceptance of their mess. Power has been stalled for decades by governments defending the status quo. Solar is about to get a whole lot more acceptable though as the cells switch from nasty rare, toxic polluting gallium to grapheme and production costs plummet. These will be the actual environmentally friendly cells and have a truly lower environmental cost along with a way cheaper price point and the way things are going - a higher efficiency ratio also. I still agree that we need stuff like the clean sealed micro reactors to keep things moving and generate the extra capacity safely while we wait for the tech to catch up. Japan was looking at an orbital solar array but I think the psudoscientist hippy eco Nazis wined too much about the dangerous skinny, confined, nonpersistant column of microwaves to transmit it back to earth. To that lot, I hope they enjoy their victory eating their all organic radioactive caesium filled rice with the knowledge they stopped that nasty pinpoint of microwave energy that may have prematurely cooked a duck or two.

He is talking about the actual movie which is actually quite decent, even from a free thought, imagination, political, moral and family angle. Yes, I liked the movie and downloaded the 'Awesome' song to blast through my car stereo when I arrived at work to mess with people

Hmm @nephilim , is the construction of your furnace outlined somewhere online, have been meaning to look into something like this.

Bioshock as above and the first Deadspace were great

Ah, I might manage the last 15 minutes or so as that's usually when I get back on a Wednesday

Default gateway should be the local switch, try ping from a client to the vlan2 address of the local switch, if this works routing is working on that one, next ping vlan 2 remote switch, then remote vlan 1 ip you can also do: tracert remoteVlan1IP and see where it stops

How long is the session generally 1 hour or so?

Seem to be getting a lot of drop outs lately when the site just stops responding. It manifests in taking 40s for the quick reply button to kick in or it only loading the title of the page and no more along with posts taking up to a minute to submit. Could be related to the 'updated' issue as the same kind of stuff happened there but resulted in a 'updated' post where as now when/if the post does make it, it does so as intended. Spans multiple Browsers/Computers/ISPs

All vlans untagged, your link ports on each switch are untagged on vlan 2, the rest are all Vlan1, the router engine in the switches takes any packets that actually need to travel across the link and puts them across vlan 2 to be dumped out on the other network by the other switch. This way only packets that need to travel across the link actually do so you don't end up flooding it with rubbish and leaking stuff from one site to the other via broadcasts

It will hit the speed as every frame from every port will need to be checked before it can be switched, whether this cripples your network or not is up to the switches and how many hosts. You could console in before and check the CPU usage, memory usage and queue depth before the change then again afterwards. Both at busy times of day to see the effect. Again, this is not the right way to configure the switches and an automated vlan assignment based on mac address would be much better but it may still work if there is enough spare cpu horsepower and memory on all of your switches to accommodate the checking of every single frame at least once before it gets anywhere.

Sounds like a good time to take a ferry instead with the current trend of planes not making it.

You are forgetting perhaps the nice features that VMs offer even if you don't have redundant systems, like spinning up the system on a high speced workstation in half an hour or so from backup or migrating between an old and new server live with no down time. Virtualisations does add another layer but it is not an especially problematic layer and the general advice against virtualising DCs is based on people snapshotting them and causing problems that way or joining the host servers to the AD domain. I like the fact I can save my backup NAS from the other end of the school and happily spin up the network on a couple of the library Multipoint servers if a car crashed through the server room or something. At any rate I am glad that the OP has it all going now on the new box and can move on to other holiday jobs.

Thanks for your opinion but I have had Hyper-V machines running since 2009 and they have been perfectly decent, both solutions have merit and are used on many places. For bigger implementations Hyper-V actually offers more features for free than ESXi stopping you from delving into the expensive end of the pool but lets not drag this thread off topic any further with a played out debate about virtualisation solutions.