deebee

I've been battling with this for the best part of 2 weeks trying to get the start menu and desktops to redirect correctly on my test network, it simply doesn't work on my Windows 7 clients. *However* I think I may have spotted the problem, I am waiting to hear back on how to properly fix it, but if you're having this problem, take a look on one of the Windows 7 clients in the Program Files\Ranger folder, there's a file called RangerUserServices.exe which handles the redirection during login, the file is 236kB, and is present and correct on all our XP machines, however on my Windows 7 test machines, the file, although it exists, is completely empty, 0 bytes. I have confirmed this behaviour on three separate testing machines running Win7 Pro and Enterprise. Every other file copies correctly from the ranger share, however that one reliably sticks at 0kB after a clean ranger install, even running the Ranger setup user, and telling it to check the installation fails to identify the issue, and telling it to install again over the top makes no difference either. If I manually copy in the file from my server share, everything starts working correctly, redirections actually occur! It's very strange, and no idea why that one file would fail to copy, but that seems to be whats 'breaking' things for my windows 7 testing machines. It would be interesting to see if anyone else who is may be having issues redirecting desktop/start menu in Windows 7 can see the same behavior?

I'm waiting to hear back from the consultant we buy Ranger through - we don't have an active service contract and last time I asked for any help from ranger direct, the reply was a 'you don't have a contract, we can't talk to you' so I was less than impressed, especially so given my question was a simple one if I remember correctly. I really hope Win7 support is stepped up significantly in Ranger 8 or we'll more than likely be disappearing from the list of Ranger customers from our next renewal. With RM behind the product now, I have at least a little faith we should see some improvements, as *everyone* currently running XP on Ranger will be having to upgrade to 7 over the next 12-18 months given Microsoft's finally dropping XP, which is fair enough.

We're running the latest Ranger (7.4.3.0) with XP clients on a server 2003 domain. The XP clients work fine, but I'm wanting to get moving on updating the network to windows 7. I've done a vanilla installation of windows 7 (x86) onto a laptop (not even gotten to automated deployment stuff yet) and then installed Ranger on it having set up the relevant policies/desktop/start menu setups required in Ranger Administrator. Apparently naïvely I expected Ranger to behave at least similarly to how it does with windows XP, 'Ranger Group Desktop' should redirect the desktop set up for the users group in Ranger Administrator, and the same goes for the start menu. Evidently I was wrong as neither the desktop nor the start menu is redirected in any way. Am I missing a trick here or is Ranger simply a broken product for post-XP use? Does anyone have this working correctly with Ranger on its own without resorting to GPO? Am I just missing a step somewhere?

Hi, I've just set up HAP+ 8.4 (with 8.4.1 My Files patch) and set up a couple of mapped drives for use, and thats worked nicely. I can do everything I want with it logged in as the admin user. However when I came to test it as a student login, it logs into the home page fine, but when i click my files, it loads the page, but fails to load the shares, I just get a rotating refresh arrow next to the top level 'My Drives' item in the tree, and a couple of messages below saying "Something is wrong" and that it's been logged. I'm assuming its some permission error given it works as admin but not as a student, but I don't know where logs might tell me. Apologies if this has been asked before but a quick scan of the forum didn't turn anything up. Any ideas? David Edit: I should probably mention its IIS6 on an old 2003R2 server we have. Edit 2: Did a bit of api peeking, on the admin login I get (from /api/MyFiles/Drives): But logged in as a student I get back JSON (also from /api/MyFiles/Drives):

I stand thoroughly corrected, I didn't know they offered this! As long as its MLPPP (probably likely to be) then pfSense with 3 NIC's (one for each FTTC connection, plus one to go to your LAN) is all you'll need. Very little CPU power will be required with the PC. Quite funny they couldnt tell you what kind of equipment (or offer to flog you a solution) on the phone, though!

If you're getting BT Infinity, I doubt you can do MLPPP - unless BT support it (I'm not aware they do..). Also you can just hook pfSense straight into the Openreach FTTC modem (forgetting the existence of the home/business hubs they provide) and get pfSense to sort the PPPoE connections to BT directly. If you want to end up with a 'bonded' connection over an ISP which doesnt support MLPPP, there are still options such as I touched on lightly with my first reply to you, which is getting a service from a suitable provider which you bond muiltiple VPN's together each end to give you the bonded connection. CCS Leeds do such a service - which is used by a friend of mine with pretty good success. I suggest you contact them before doing much else to discuss the exact setup that would be required. It *WILL* be an additional monthly subscription to achieve it I'm afraid. Again, assuming BT do not support MLPPP. Edit: I am referring to BT Broadband here - as the ISP, vs BT Openreach who provide the physical infrastructure.

I'm a huge fan of pfSense, been using it since version 0.3 or so back in 2006. Even hosted a mirror for them for a while. The guys in their IRC channel are very helpful if you get stuck, and the forums are a good place to get help. As for your requirement for MLPPP, it entirely depends on what you're trying to achieve exactly. If you want to just get two connections working and people going over both, you could get by with a load balancer on pfSense, along with two ADSL modems such as I said originally. This would work 'ok' for web browsing, but ultimately, some traffic would go over each connection, but one download stream could never break past the bandwidth available over a single line, in your example of tow 26mbit (ish) FTTC connections, no single user could get more than 26mbit down on a single download. You also get the issue of being on the internet with two different IP's. This shouldnt pose a big issue for general web browsing, but it can cause issues with SSL and other site logins where they check to see if you're on a given address. Also if you access any services which filter based on source IP, it can be hassle to have two addresses. MLPPP solves both shortcomings as packets are split evenly over the available links, allowing you the sum of all the links bandwidth to be accessed by a single stream (2x 26mbit so 52mbit 'connection'), packets are then reconstituted at the ISP end, and go out to the internet as a single address. This has a few advantages, but as I said, relies on ISP support for using it. LACP/LAGG isnt quite the same as MLPPP, and requires the far end of whatever interfaces you have LAGG/LACP running on (PPPoE interfaces in this case) to be running LACP/LAGG at the far end in order to coordinate a 'bonded' connection. Not sure its even possible over a WAN link, and still gives the limitation of a single stream only getting as much bandwidth as the link it happens to go over, its generally something you'd use to increase bandwidth/increase resilience between on-site switches/routers.

A friend of mine just pointed out that MikroTik RouterBoards with RouterOS are able to act as an MLPPP client, under £80. I've no experience myself but that could be an extremely cheap and compact system for accomplishing what you're after, without eating much valuable rack space.

Any PC with three NIC's would do the job then, reason I suggested those mini-itx boards is they can be put in very compact cases which would take up less space in your rack - that and, power usage is very low on those!

There are a few atom based mini-itx boards around with a couple of gigE ports on them, Jetway do one with dual gigE (JNC9C-550-LF), and a small daughterboard that provides a further three gigE ports, total cost around £150 with the IO plate. Just need to add a small case/psu to that, some memory, and a tiny SSD. More than likely under £250 would get you a complete system with a dual-core Atom, plenty of grunt for routing a pretty hefty connection. Power usage should be under 25W too at a rough guess.

Hi, We had a managed system with 35 AP's installed about 18 months ago made by Aruba Networks. We have a mixture of 2x2:2 and 3x3:3 AP's. AP-105, AP-135 models. All are a/b/g/n simultaneous dual band radios. In my opinion if you're running any more than about 10 clients in a single room, dual band should be an absolute must, there's just so much more space available in the 5ghz band its silly not to use it. The controller we have is a 3400, which can take care of 64 local AP's on your network. We are a relatively small secondary school with around 425 students, laptops outnumber desktops around 2:1 these days! We've had precisely zero issues aside for a single AP just stopping working one day - replaced under warranty with little fuss! While it was down the surrounding AP's took up the slack without issue. Cost wise, the entire installation was specced and arranged by our county infrastructure service who provided all switching and cabling for us, including a wireless survey (essential!) up front to decide how many and where the AP's should be. It was inevitably more expensive than some other managed wireless. I think our system with 35 AP's cost around £22000 18 months back, system alone, not the cabling/switching. But the system is rock solid and I've been unable to catch it out, with it distributing clients across AP's and a/n or g/n bands where the clients are capable. On our 3x3:3 laptops on 3x3:3 AP's we easily surpass fast ethernet connection speeds to clients, really does border on 'as good as' a wire! I am confident that the system will serve us well for many years to come. When looking at systems when we were deciding what to go for, we did look at Meru as they use quite a different philosophy to wireless than most, where the entire site I believe runs on a single wireless channel with AP's only being 'dumb' radios that are extensions of the controller, that allows for very high client density and seamless roaming, but the cost was decidedly higher and probably a bit over the top for our needs! Hope that helps a little! -deebee

It's never ideal to put a PC, or indeed home-targeted modems into a cabinet but at times its not something you can get away from without spending a great deal more on a complete product - which I'm sure is out there, probably some cisco routers with ADSL2+ interface cards in them, cost is bound to be far higher than a put-together system. There are a number of vendors in the UK that produce rackmounted low power machines for using pfSense (or m0n0wall etc) within a rack. Don't need much in the way of CPU power, just a few NICs!

You may want to look into using a small appliance running pfSense which supports MLPPP giving you a pretty powerful routing platform. Would just require a few ADSL2+ modems such as a Netgear DM111P (can be had as refurbs, good modems though). Then you'd need a low-powered PC with one NIC for LAN, one port for each WAN you plan to use. Do make sure that your ISP supports MLPPP before doing anything though, as thats a small minority here in the UK. Alternatively you can find a few providers around in the UK which provide multilink VPN based solutions where you set up two or more vanilla ADSL connections, and then layer VPN's over the top which are aggregated at the service provider and provide 'bonded' connection. A potential bonus of this method is you can use different ISP's on different lines, allowing for more redundancy if a line should go down. edit: can't spell..