Tall_Paul

I suffer badly with it too. If I work in an air-conditioned office my nose bleeds from one nostril. I really recommend the Neilmed range on Amazon. It's works brilliantly. This starter pack is well worth the money.

Used by plenty of schools in Torbay and AFAIK those that used them were very happy with the service provided.

Something to possibly be aware of is that Avast blocked this from installing for me. I've submitted the file to Avast for their labs to check it out.

That's very good indeed! To put it into context I have around 10K games and 780 WN8 (though I didn't start really improving until around 3K games when I joined my clan).

I went from a school (5 years there) to the private sector (head of IT for a small manufacturing firm). What prompted me to jump was a new Head coming in who didn't value support staff at all (but saw no problem increasing SLT from 6 to 13). I'm very happy where I am now, and it's nice to feel appreciated again. In contrast I wasn't replaced and an overstretched team of 3 is now a massively overstretched team of 2.

Loads of negatives on The Register about this today. I've removed my account and will use Keepass from now on.

I use a Jacarta Interseptor. It can measure a wide variety of things using various plugins, but I measure temperature, humidity, voltage and whether or not water is present. For a real belt and braces approach I interrogate it via SNMP with PRTG (I can then set very detailed alarm conditions). It works excellently and I'm very pleased with it. An added bonus is it's made in the UK.

I was considering purchasing NOD32 for all my workstations but I'm going to give Avast a go and see how we get on. Many thanks to all of you for your feedback whilst you've been trying it.

PRTG here as well with the free 100 sensors. It's brilliant. When we're virtualised shortly (don't ask) I'll run VEEAM One again too.

They are, erm, yes. I don't even know if I'd use one if I got given it for free!

Ex Machina. Very good indeed.

I've sat there so long I've made my legs numb and had a mark on my legs before! Lately (whilst at home) it's taken so long because I've been playing Kingdom Rush. A stage can easily take 20 mins.

I used to do disk-disk-tape and followed the 'traditional' Grandfather-Father-Son backup methodology. Incremental backups Monday-Thursday with a full backup starting on Friday night. It seemed to work OK. Never had a problem restoring anything (though not as easy as reverse incremental obviously).

That is really, really useful. Many thanks for that. - - - Updated - - - No, I haven't looked at Synology yet. I may well do though!

The SAN they have quoted us for is a Dell Equalogic PS4100 containing 12TB of Nearline SAS disks configured as RAID 10. It's about £7.5K.

That's interesting, thanks for that. The consultant has told me that DPACK reported 1,168 IOPS on the 95th percentile and peaking to 1,700 IOPS on the 99th percentile. Apparently the SAN they have recommended is capable of just over 5000 IOPS which is why they've recommended it.

Yes, I thought something like this too (though maybe tiered with SAS storage and nearline SAS). All nearline SAS (presumably spinning at 7200RPM) makes no sense to me at all. Unless there's been some sort of fundamental change in nearline SAS disks I can't understand they any consultant would recommend a production SAN containing only those disks.

I'm going to ask them to explain the results of the DPACK report to me. I only ran it for 24 hours so it might be worth running it for longer. I couldn't run DPACK on the NAS even if I wanted to! However, I'm not concerned about that (happy to put files onto nearline SAS). It may be that nearline SAS will be fine. But none of my physical boxes contain disks of that spec, they are all either 10 or 15K SAS disks! Hence I am somewhat bemused!

The consultant was for a reseller who I have used a lot at my last school. I can't get my head around all nearline SAS either. I've bought two SANs in the past and neither of them had this configuration! I've popped them an email this morning asking them to explain it. If I implement something like this and it's crap it'll be my bottom that's on the line!

Hi all I am in the process of getting quotes and recommendations for a new SAN. I have five servers that I am going to virtualise (two DC's, two DB servers and a mail security server). I'll also be adding new servers that don't currently exist (for example, we have a NAS rather than a file server). Quick question though. When I've bought SANs in the past it has been tiered storage. A mix of SAS (for OS', databases, etc) and nearline SAS (for file storage, etc). I've ran the Dell DPACK utility on my current servers and, as a result of this, one of the consultants has recommended a SAN containing only nearline SAS disks. Now, I know this keeps the costs down but I do find it odd to have no SAS disks at all. Has anybody else got anything similar to this?

They're additional 'bolt ons' that you may or may not have installed. All it's saying is that it's put the current versions in those locations should you wish to upgrade them (which you'll have to do manually from the specified download location). It's nothing to be concerned about.

I've just spoken to my Indian account manager and Indian technical specialist. I need to take off my 'Mr Bigot' hat (although, to be fair, I have had a lot of issues with call centres based in other countries if their English isn't very good). They were both very helpful indeed (though there was a touch of a language barrier). They are going to quote me for the VRTX and also the FX once I've generated some IOPS data using DPAK. I'm also going to speak to Ed at VeryPC to see what solution they can come up with, and also a local Devon-based provider who I've used before. Three options should be sufficient.

Do you mind PM-ing me the number of your Dell account manager? I've raised a query via Dell directly but I've had a callback from someone in India rather than a UK-based account manager.

Very interesting. Did you buy it direct from Dell or through a vendor?

To connect it to a 'normal' PC you will need a USB-serial converter. They're about £12 from Amazon. Another option (if the switch supports it) is to turn on Telnet through the web console, then connect to the switches through Putty using Telnet. Generally I've found the web consoles of Procurves offer limited functionality when compared to the CLI.