Naughty_Nigel

Thank you. I thought that was where I put it, but it seems I was mistaken. Nigel.

What an analagy? It depends a lot on the backup software that you use. We have used Retrospect for about ten years now, which only performs a complete backup onto new media when requested. Otherwise it does a daily incremental backup, and you just keep addng tapes as and when required. Only the latest backup is verified, so you don't need to swap tapes for verification unless two tapes are needed for the backup. If a restore is required, the catalogue provides a list of restore points, so you can choose when to restore from. Regarding backup media, if you are currently using tape, you could add a second drive, so that when Tape 1 is full, Tape 2 will take over. This will also simplify verification. You don't state which type of tape drive you are using, but if (say) you are using LTO2, you could add an LTO3 drive, which has double the capacity (and is faster), and can also read and write to LTO2 tapes. (An LTO4 drive can read LTO2 tapes, but cannot write to them. However, the cost of LTO 2, 3 and 4 drives and media is currently very similar, so it would be a logical step.) You can of course run multiple SCSI drives on one adaptor, but there is no reason why the second drive shouldn't be a SAS device. Dependiing on your software, you can also copy between or consolidate backup sets if you have two drives. Nigel.

Thank you. That would be great. As I said, I could buy a new PCIe SCSI card, but apart from the cost (at least £100 + VAT), I have a brand new LSI20160 card and a vacant PCI slot, so it seems a pity not to use them. I will keep my fingers crossed that you still have the drivers. Nigel.

I have just bought an LSI Logic LSI 20160 SCSI Adaptor card to fit into the PCI slot on an HP Desktop machine running Windows 7 x64. (This is so I can backup and recover files from tapes using a spare HP Tape Streamer which has an Ultra 160 SCSI port.) However, on installing the card I have found there are no Windows 7 drivers available. I have done a bit of research, and I understand that the drivers were provided with some versions of Windows 2008 x 64 server, but not the R2 variants. (They are not on our own 2008 R2 server.) One forum post provided a list of driver files (see below), and suggests that the drivers from Server 2008 work perfectly well in 2008 R2, but are not signed; so presumably, they will also work in Windows 7 x64? (There was also a link to a zip file containing the required drivers, but this was over two years old, and had evidently been removed. ) LSI say they have no plans to release drivers for Windows 7 or 2008 R2. The latest drivers listed on their website seem to be for Windows Xp and 2003. The alternative is that I install a PCIe SCSI adaptor, but they don't come cheap. Does anyone have any suggestions or ideas?

Have you ever tried to install an HP printer from the list in Windoze? There are thousands of the dammed things, so I can see why HP is reluctant to support every single one with its own driver, especially when the gubbins inside the printers is probably near enough identical. I have found the HP PCL 6 Universal drivers work OK, but the PCL 5 universal drivers never seem to recognise device properly, and so cannot be configured for additional trays, duplexing and so forth. Having said that, I am currently having great difficulties installing x86 print drivers onto 2008 R2 (to support printers on Xp clients). I can select the option for x86 drivers, and it asks for the driver files, but then rejects anything that I offer it, saying that x86 drivers are not compatible. NN

Oh well, I am pleased you found an answer. I don't know if it is just me, but printing seems to be more complicated by the day. Oh for the days of the Laserjet 2. NN

I can see that disk backup to a QNAP NAS would work well if you have a fast connection to a remote site, but where that is not available I would still rather use tape so that cartridges can be kept off-site. I don't think RDX is practical except for very small networks with small amounts of data to back up. NN

How fast? And how much does it cost per gigabyte? (More than two pence I would imagine. ) NN

Tape may be 'very last decade', but it is also very fast - much faster than RDX, although I would concede that RDX is quicker to find individual files. We are currently using both RDX and LTO 3 systems. Using EMC Retrospect, backups to RDX run at about 500 MB a minute average. Backups to LTO 3 tape run at about 3 GB per minute, with an overall average of about 2.4 GB per minute. RDX may be a more reliable backup medium then previous hard disk systems, but I have had numerous problems with large backups to external drives over the years. By contrast, I have only ever suffered one LTO 2 tape breakage in about seven years. RDX cartridges also cost at least ten times as much as LTO tape per gigabyte of storage space. NN

It won't work for the reasons already stated. I suspect the tape head design changes with each new generation, and in any case each tape cartridge has an embedded chip (4 KB if I remember correctly) which identifies the tape to the drive, contains a Serial No, and also stores usage and failure data. Regardless of whether an LTO 4 drive can read and write to LTO 5 tapes; the LTO 4 drive will identify an LTO 5 tape cartridge as soon as it engages in the drive, and will spit it out. For what its worth, earlier generations of LTO tapes and drives do exactly the same. NN

That is useful advice, thank you. From what you are saying, folders must be given the same name as their owner if this script is to work, and owners can only save files in their own folders. This should work well enough in an educational environment, but is not so easy in a workplace. SB

We don't use Publisher 2010, but unlike Word, printing options are usually set in Publisher itself (File, Page Setup, Printer and Paper), rather than in the print dialogue boxes at the printing stage, and these settings overide the options set in the print dialogue boxes (if that makes sense). You may also find that the student's Publisher files have been set for a printer other than your HP 2025, (perhaps a B&W printer), in which case this will need to be changed from the files concerned. Now, there is an option in PCL6 (on the 'Color' tab) to 'Print in grayscale'. I suspect this option has been selected at some point; possibly to save wasted colour copies whilst drafting. You will need to check the various dialogue boxes outlined above to see if and where this has been set. I hope this helps. NN

Disk quotas work best on clean drives. When you set disk quotas on existing drives the OS doesn't automatically know who the files belong to, so if you allow 'John Smith' 500 MB, he will get 500 MB plus the files he already has on the drive! It is possible to set ownership of files manually, but that is a real faff. NN

Hi again Chris, I got the UPS's from somewhere in Staffordshire if I remember correctly. The APC software has a 'calibration' mode, which is used to calibrate the battery/UPS combination, providing an estimated run-time on batteries. Remember that UPS batteries vary slightly in capacity owing to temperature and design, and in any case lose capacity with age, so the software/firmware is designed to cope with this. Nevertheless, a UPS can get this calculation wrong in exactly the same way that a laptop can; especially with older batteries; which is why it is a good idea to set attached computers to shut down where there is 25% or more power remaining. In practice, the estimated remaining capacity/run time of a UPS is calculated from the battery terminal voltage (compared with the fully charged value) and load. When the voltage drops below a pre-set value the UPS will send out a signal to attached PC's to shut down. The UPS uses a similar system to check battery health when it is switched on. If the battery voltage drops below a pre-set value when loaded, the UPS will indicate that a replacement is required, even if the battery only needs charging. NN

There are plenty of used UPS's on the market at present. For best value buy one without batteries, (this saves on postage, and in any case you never know how good the batteries are), and then buy a new set of batteries for it. I recently bought a used APC SU1000i and two APC SU750i UPS's (with built in USB ports) for £50 all in! I then bought genuine APC replacement batteries (open box) for £55 each! By the way, the APC SU1000i can be fitted with batteries from the 1500VA model simply by removing the internal restraint rails. This will provide a 50% increase in run time. NN

Ideally, any sensors should be fitted inside the equipment housing. Depending on their type, you may be able to clamp the sensors to the outside of the housing, (relying on thermal conductivity of the metal casing). I would NOT fit thermal sensors in the exhaust air outlet, simply because if the fan(s) fail the equipment will overheat very rapidly, but the sensor will think the air is cool as there will be no hot exhaust air blowing over it! Similarly I don't think it would be a good idea to fit temperature sensors in the air inlet. However, many motherboards and CPU's have thermal sensors built in which could be utilised. Many servers can also be set to shut down in the event of fan failure. I hope that helps. NN

Powerchute was/is free, but if I remember correctly, APC used to charge for network shutdown software. Presumably they have changed their policy? However, the Powerchute version that I had would not install on 2003R2, and was very 'flaky' on XP. It did, however, provide a useful log of power events which could stretch back several years, and which I used to persuade Northern Electric that there was a real problem with their supply in our village. They had dismissed complaints from villagers for well over two years, demanding that we provide proof that there was a problem. I was able to provide them with a 120 page report listing every power event for nearly four years, which I don't think they had bargained for!

Or, if the motherboard has on-board audio you should be able to disable it via the BIOS settings. NN

The Windows volume control mixer will allow you to mute some sounds whilst allowing others. You can also disable Windows sounds easily enough. I wouldn't advise disconecting leads inside the case for a variety of reasons, but you can buy 3.5 mm jack plugs cheaply enough (from Maplin) to stop any sound form coming out! NN

Thank you very much for your comments. The server is a new Fujitsu machine, and is located in an office at 'office' temperatures. We don't have air conditioning so summertime temperatures are likely to reach 28 °C or so on a hot day. This has never been a problem in the past. The fans in our old Dell PowerEdge 1600 SC were quite noisy. They didn't blow that much air but made a lot of mechanical noise, so the server was relegated to an old boiler house where nobody could hear it. However, this was far from ideal from other points of view, especially when it came to feeding it with tapes! Like most tower servers nowadays the new Fujitsu machine is extremely quiet, (quieter even than the HP Desktops that it serves), so the decision was made to bring it in from the cold so it was more secure and easily accessible. Our old Quantum LTO 2 HH drive worked perfectly well in the new server. The fan did make a bit of a racket whilst it was working, but that didn't matter as our backups are scheduled to start at midnight, and are completed long before anyone is around to complain about the noise. You are right that large fans spin slowly and can move a lot of air with minimal noise; but I doubt that they create sufficient wind pressure to pull the required volumes of air through the confines of a half-height tape drive, even though the Quantum 'B' series drives have clearly been redesigned with ventilation in mind. A small fan running at high speed moves less air, and makes more noise, but does create higher wind pressure. (And 5 cubic feet of air a minute is a lot of air to pull through a tape drive.) I suppose it would be possible to fit an additional fan into the server, but that would increase noise, and in sucking air out of the box would reduce air flow through the power supply, which doesn’t seem like a good idea to me. Alternatively, I could disable BIOS control of the existing three fans, but that would make the machine unnecessarily noisy, and from what I can see, still wouldn't provide the pressure differential that is needed across the tape drive to keep it cool. However, what both puzzles and concerns me is that Quantum clearly saw the need to provide active cooling in their earlier LTO drives, (even though servers and PC's of the day moved a lot more air), which meant that the drives could be fitted into any vacant 5¼ inch drive bay without fear of overheating, but they have removed the cooling system from recent drive models without telling anyone! (Remember that these tape drives are marketed for use in both file servers and desktop machines, so airflow cannot be guaranteed.) The difficulty I have is that the drives themselves have not failed (yet), but they have now broken two tapes, as the ultra-thin tape material simply cannot cope with the 65 °C plus working temperatures inside the drives. The obvious solution is to switch to an external drive with built in cooling, but I would need to convince somebody at Quantum that this was justified to allow me to 'trade up' so to speak. The technical support representative that I spoke to was very helpful, but didn't seem to understand the issues involved, and had clearly never actually fitted one of these drives himself. NN

It might be one in a million, but the MTBF of any one drive in an array will be just the same as the other drives, so if one drive fails after several years service the chances are that another one will fail soon! Plus, if there are factors which have contributed to the failure of one drive, (temperature, shock, power failure, etc), those same factors will also apply to other drives in the array. NN

To follow up on the above, it seems 'B Series' Quantum LTO 3HH internal tape drives do not have their own cooling, but instead rely on the cooling provided by the host computer. This is all very well on older machines which pump a lot of air, but most modern PC's and servers are designed to run cool, with minimum airflow to minimise energy consumption and noise. I have looked at the data for the HP LTO 3 HH internal drives, (which look identical to me). HP make it clear that a minimum airflow of 5 Cubic Feet per Minute must be provided by the system fans to keep the tape drive cool. Quantum, by contrast, only state that 5 CFM airflow is required, front to back – not that this airflow must be provided by the system fans. (The figure quoted for the Quantum LTO 2 HH drives is 9 CFM, front to back – but this is provided by a fan built in to the tape drive itself. The LTO 3 drive has no such provision.) It looks as if we will have to buy an external LTO 3 drive with it's own cooling built in, as the internal LTO 3 drive overheats on anything other than an incremental backup, and has already eaten two tapes. This seems to be a serous oversight on an expensive piece of hardware, especially given the very low air volumes now required for cooling desktop machines and tower servers. It looks to me as if the bean counters have been doing some 'value engineering', and are probably congratulating themselves on saving 50 pence per unit on cooling fans. NN

How about RAID 5EE using five disks? NN

How about RAID 5EE using five disks? NN

Well that was quick and decisive! Thank you. I guess it is easy enough to re-enable it if we ever needed it for some bizarre reason. NN