Naughty_Nigel

Our new 2008 R2 Standard server has IPv6 set up on it by default, but this is not configured properly. . I am reciving error messages saying that the IPv6 network adaptors on the server should be set to static IP adresses (as they are with IPv4). What would be the reccomended settings, or can we just disable it althogether? (Our IPv4 adresses are 192.168.0.2 for the LAN, and 192.168.0.30 for the internet connection. The router is 192.168.0.1) NN

At one time components would be manufactured all over the place, so a local problem would not affect global supply. However, modern [short sighted] business practice is to centralise production of any one item in one place, as that makes it cheaper short term, but leaves the business extremely vulnerable to local problems - such as the Japanese earthquake, and the floods in Thailand. However, the bean counters who make these decisions are not bothered by this, as they will have made their names, and collected their bonuses when disaster strikes, and will be busy speculating on stock of the commodity concerned. NN

Many thanks for your very helpful replies. In view of the problems we had with 2011 SBS, (and the impossibility of getting our supplier to offer a refund, or swap our unused, unregistered 2011 package for 2008 SBS), we spent yesterday evening configuring Server 2008 R2 as our permanent OS. It runs so well on our server, and needs so little in the way of resources that I really cannot see the point in complicating things. (On this subject, I assume that 2008 R2 Foundation Server is just like 2008 R2 Standard, but has limitations on the number of users, memory and the number of CPU's installed? I doubt that we would use it, but I would be interested to know.) As far as Exchange is concerned, we will run our old 2003 R2 SBS server alongside the new one for the time being, but for various reasons have decided to give the cloud a try. I liked Server 2003 R2 SBS because we could just add what we wanted, when we wanted it, and did not have the overhead of an unnecessarily bloated OS package running 24/7. I gather that Server 8 is supposed to be much more streamlined. Let's hope so anyway. Thanks again. NN

It should work [using mixed SATA II and SATA III], as each drive has its own port in SATA; but your array will only be as fast as the slowest drive. Regarding the use of different sized drives; you can create an array using any mixture of drive sizes, but again, the array can only be as big as your smallest drive, and as fast as your slowest drive! Depending on what space you have left over, you can use redundant space to create a simple volume, or (if you have space on two drives), a mirrored volume. When disk space was more expensive and slower than it is now, we often used a simple volume for the OS, on the grounds that we could easily re-install it; but data is more important and more diffucult to replace, so there is good reason to configure an array sch as Raid 5EE which provides redundancy, and will rebuild itself quickly in the event of a drive failure. I have, in the past, also created a clone of the OS disk on a spare hard drive, so that if things go wrong, it is simply a matter of swapping drives to get going again. NN

Following on from another thread; we recently replaced our old Dell PE 1600SC server with a new Fujitsu Tx100 S3 machine, which works very well. I have been running a trial of 2008 R2 Standard (not SBS) for the past two weeks, and it has been flying along. However, we installed 2011 SBS Standard at the weekend, which reduced it to a crawl, and was very unstable, with individual windows flickering on and off for a minute or so after opening them, and sometimes just hanging altogether. Upload and download speeds were also much slower at about 20 MB/second over gigabit etehrnet, compared with around 80 MB/second on Server 2008 R2. (This is all despite the machine more than meeting Microsoft's reccomended specifications.) All in all I felt as if it had been written by the Vista team. A second installation was no better, so we have reverted to the 2008 R2 trial for now. I am therefore considering 2008 R2 SBS Standard (rather than 2011 SBS). Does anyone have experience of this on anything less than a megaserver? (We only have a 3.1 GHz quad core Xeon and 8 GB of RAM, which was clearly not enough for 2011.) From what I see it will run on 4 GB of RAM, rather than the 8GB minimum reccomended for 2011. Is it possible to select which elements are installed at installation, as the problem with 2011 seemed to be that absolutely everything was installed and activated, whether we wanted it or not. (I have to say, my converstation with the helpline person at Microsoft on this matter did nothing to endear me to the oganisation.) I had understood that anything which worked with 2008 R2 should also work with 2011, but this was not my experience. I could not get it to recognise my HP RDX drive, (and HP do not provide 2011 specific drivers), whilst Retrospect also failed to work properly. So; what I really want to know is whether SBS 2008 R2 is as slow, bloated and unsupported as SBS 2011, or whether 2008 would be a better choice on a more modest machine? NN

I think it might be best if I move this to the Server 2008 forum.

Thanks for all the replies. I learnt the (very obvious lesson) about 64 bit when I tried to install Server 2008 R2 onto our old Dell PowerEdge machine. (Doh!) Its so easy to forget that 64 bit CPU's are fairly recent innovations, and the old Dell certainly wasn't fitted with them! Anyhow, we decided to replace the server with a new Fujitsu Tx100 S3 machine, which works very well. I have been running a trial of 2008 R2 Standard for the past two weeks, and it has been flying along. However, we installed 2011 SBS at the weekend, which reduced it to a crawl, and was very unstable, with individual windows flickering on and off for a minute or so after opening them. Upload and download speeds were also much slower. (This is all despite the machine more than meeting Microsoft's reccomended specifications.) A second installation was no better, so we have reverted to the 2008 R2 trial for now. I am therefore considering 2008 R2 SBS Standard (rather than 2011 SBS). Does anyone have experience of this on anything less than a megaserver? (We only have a 3.1 GHz quad core Xeon and 8 GB of RAM, which was clearly not enough for 2011.) From what I see i will run on 4 GB of RAM, rather than the 8GB minimum reccomended for 2011. Is it possible to select which elements are installed at installation, as the problem with 2011 seemed to be that absolutely everything was installed and activated, whether we wanted it or not. (I have to say, my converstaion with the helpline person at Microsoft did nothing to endear me to the oganisation) NN

Does anyone here run a Quantum LTO-3 tape drive (or LTO-4, or LTO-5 for that matter)? I have recently installed a new Quantum LTO 3 HH tape drive into our tower server alongside the existing LTO 2 drive. It works well, backs up at 3 GB a minute or more, and is blissfully quiet - too quiet in fact. The old LTO-2 drive has a small cooling fan at the back which whines away whenever it is running, but stays cool. The new LTO-3 drive has no fan that i can see, and seems to run very hot - so hot in fact that I cannot hold my hand on the top of the unit when it is running, whilst the tape cartidge also feels hot after half an hour or so. I can also smell the hot tape! (The data sheet says that it requires 30 CFM of air, but there is not a breath of air flowing in or out of the drive.) I have installed X-Talk, which reports drive temperatures in excess of 60 °C after half an hour of running in a room where the ambient is about 18 °C. The crunch is that the new drive swallowed an LTO 2 tape directly after running a full backup onto an LTO 3 tape (presumably becuase of heat). Quantum have replaced that drive, and have said that it should not get that hot, but the new drive does exactly the same. Surely two drives cannot be faulty? If anyone else is running one of these drives I would be grateful for any comment. Both are internal drives. The LTO-2 is SCSI, whilst the LTO-3 has a SAN interface. I haev connected both the Molex and SATA power cables. Thanking you all in advance. NN

I have just downloaded a six month trial of Server 2008 R2, which I will install as soon as I get the opportunity. I was tempted to try the 2011 download, but I have a horrible feeling that driver support for our hardware could be a problem. NN

Thanks James. I think the decision is made! I will need the software one way or another, so I might as well give it a try before splashing out on new hardware. My research so far is that both the RAID card (Adaptec 2820SA) and SCSI card have native suppport from within 2008 R2. NN

Sorry, I didn't make myself clear. Would it be practical to install Server 2008 R2 into our Dell PowerEdge server? It currently has a single 2.8 Ghz Dual Core Xeon CPU, and has a socket for a second CPU. Memory is 2 GB, but I would be happy to increase it to 4 GB if this is worthwhile. On of my concerns is that our current server has an Adaptec 8 port SATA Raid card (with an array of 5 disks in 5EE), and an adaptec SCSI 160 card for our tape drives. We couldn't use either in a new, all PCIe machine, and form what I understand, SCSI cards are not available for the new PCIe slots. Following Jamesfed's post I have tried pinging the server. There is no packet loss, and reported round journey time is 0 ms. NN

Would it be realistic to install this on the PE 1600 SC? NN

Thanks for the replies. We had/have simialr problems with slow file transfer speed on XP, it's just that the speed of Win 7 /64 makes it so much more obvious, and it is easier to see how quickly the data is moving. In other words, this is a problem with our file server, not Windows 7. Anyhow, I will look at the other possibilities first. Thanks again. NN

Oh well, seems there is no answer to this problem. Maybe I should try somewhere else? I have spent the afternoon updating drivers, but still no better. Would it be practical to update the Dell 1600 SC to Server 2008, which would hopefully overcome our printing problems as well? I have been looking at newer machines, but there seem to be practical difficulties, such as running LTO tape drives with SCSI interface when no PCIe cards are available. I am reluctant to throw away a perfectly good tape drive simply because I cannot find a SCSI card for it. Or am I missing something somewhere? NN

I suspect your biggest problem will be printing [via the server] from the Win 7/64 machines. In theory the 64 bit printer drivers can be installed alongside the 32 bit drivers in 2003 R2, but I cannot make it work, and I have heard similar comments from others about this. Another problem we have discovered is that the 'Previous Versions' function in 2003 no longer works, or is certainly not visible from Win 7/64. I thought I should mention this, as we find the Previous Versions function a real lifesaver, and is much quicker and easier than restoring a file from last night's tape. Win 7 has it's own previous versions facility, but this doesn't work on network drives. NN

We have a Dell PowerEdge 1600SC file server (fitted with a single Xeon 2.8 CPU) at the centre of our small business / home network. The server has an Adaptec SATA RAID card fitted, and has five hard drives running in RAID 5EE configuration. The server also has an LTO 2 tape drive for backup, currently using Retrospect 6.6. Antivirus is the current version of Kaspersky Small Office Security. I write a lot of technical reports and technical articles in MS Word, and also take a lot of photographs, which are stored in their camera raw format. I have recently archived a lot of older data, so current data on the server is about 200 GB total. I have installed a Gigabit wired Ethernet network throughout the house and office, which consistently reports GB/s connections. So far so good. Backup speeds on the server using the tape drive are up to around 2.5 GB a minute. Copying a 2GB folder of camera raw files from one partition to another takes about 25 seconds, so clearly there is no problem with data read or write speed. HOWEVER, if I were to copy the same 2 GB folder to one of the clients this would take several minutes. (Windows 7 / 64 reports a maximum of around 22 MB/s, dropping to about 14 MB/s by the end of the transfer). Copying the same files back takes even longer, with Windows 7 reporting a speed of around 5 MB/s. As you might expect, reading and writing files form this server is painfully slow, whilst our accounts programme also struggles. Meanwhile, copying files from one client to another is much faster, at between 80 and 120 MB/s, so clearly the network is not at fault. Does anyone have any ideas where the problem could be? I am tempted to update the server, which I know is getting a bit long in the tooth, but I would rather find out where the problem is first. Any help gratefully received! NN