Fazza

On searching the internet on this isssue I came across lots of people saying that they were getting fed up of having to constantly babysit DPM doing this sort of thing. How on earth do large organisations like Microsoft manage this program as they have infinately more data than I have to backup?!

I'm trying to investigate how good Microsofts VDI solution is so I decided to install it and I have failed to do so! I installed Server 2012, did all available Updates and then went through the remote desktop services installation wizard. I'm installing it on a test server so I chose the Quick Start option (so all the roles are installed on the one server) and then chose the Virtual machine-based desktop deployment. After an automatic reboot I'm greeted with a error that says "The post installation configuration dod not complete" nothing in the Event Viewer to indicate what these errors are. On drilling the errors down in Server Manager which had a red flag highlighted, it narrowed it down to "one or more unknown errors" - really useful! I then removed what it had installed and tried doing a Standard Deployment rather than the Quick Start option and now I get a diffrerent error message after the automatic reboot - it's telling me that the RD connection broker server isnt opening remote connections. I can find loads of installation guides and helpfull information about 2008 R2 RDS but very little for 2012! Has anyone else installed the latest version of RDS, if so how did your installation go and did you follow any setup guides that you could give me the link to so I can see what I'm doing wrong?

Fairly sure as if I manually modify the disk allocation to a very large number and then run a synchronisation job with consistency check it then backs up OK. One thing I didnt mention in my little rant above is that it's a new installation of SCDPM that I only installed 1.5 weeks ago so it could just be teething troubles, maybe?!

We're in the process of upgrading/migrating our servers to an all 2012 domain and so far (touch wood) it's going to plan. One issue we had was with SCDPM 2012 crashing the MMC it's running in when clicking on Recovery, after several hours of swaering at it I had a moan on Twitter and someone gave me the fix (just needed to update SCDPM 2012 to SP1). Some servers (2008 R2) we've done a direct upgrade to 2012, most though we've started from scratch and migrated the features and roles across. One we are leaving until the summer break though is the Exchange upgrade to 2013 so there'll be no one on site to moan when it goes offline for a bit!

Every day without fail since installing SCDMP 2012 I come in to work to find different server backups complaining of running out of free space. How much space does it want/need? Who knows! It doesn't say so you have to throw a dart at a dartboard, multiply it by 10, add a random number from 1 to 1,000,000 and see if you manually modify the disk allocation to this number if it will work or not! When you first add a new server to be protected by DPM to a protection group it goes off to the server and has a look at what space is needed. Why on earth can't it do this now? Instead of just telling me it's run out of space, it should be able to tell me how much space it needs! There's got to be a better way DPM can do this, is this going to happen all the time people save things on our servers or am I missing a button somewhere that will stop this from happening? The auto-grow feature is enbled but this only grows one server every 15 minutes by 10GB which is clearly not enough. I'm let to believe Microsoft use SCDPM on an extremely large scale, they must have hundreds of people whose only job it is, is to manually modify the disk allocations each and every day. ***Rant over*** Any suggestions on how I can improve the way DPM is working?

Unfortunately not. I told it to erase one of the tapes and it failed because of a protection agent failure so Free (contains data) doesn't seem to mean it can actually be used as is which is a bit confusing.

They are marked as Free (contains data) so I'm assuming they are ready to be used and DPM will overwrite the existing data on them?

I've just put 7 tapes in to our SuperLoader Tape Library that were used in our previous DPM server some time ago. They are coming up as Tape Available - Free (contains data). Silly question time: do I need to erase these tapes or will DPM overwrite the data that is already on it? Thanks

Thats going to be the future. It wont be long before it's the only option, a GUI-less Server OS.

I'm in the middle of tinkering with our backup solution so know where you're coming from. SCDPM is what my predecessor set up so I've decided to continue using it as it seemed to work OK. I've decommissioned the old server and have set it up on a new server with a couple of iSCSI devices connected to it, along with an autoloader tape device. Once I've made sure all the servers we want backing up, are being successfully backed up I'll be setting up another SCDPM server with a slightly smaller iSCSI device attached to it to backup the Primary DPM server along duplicating some of our server backups of what we consider to be our most important servers. This server will be situated in a building at the other end of the School so in the worst case scenario we'll be able to get our major servers back online.

If your SmartBoard is connected to your laptop via USB then your issue will be that the laptop is still trying to Output to its own sound card/speakers. There's an option in the speaker icon on the taskbar to set a default output, plug in your USB SmartBoard and set it as the default, you'll then get sound out of your speakers and when disconnected it will come out of the laptop speakers. I had this the other day and this sorted it out for me.

The first thing I do is go to the desktop and do exactly what you do! Don't really use the Modern UI much as after installing lots of program's it gets very, very messy.

Whether we like it or not, the Modern UI (formerly known as Metro) is the future and whether or not it has a Start button to activate it is neither here nor there as the most likely thing that will happen with the next Windows client OS is that the Desktop will disappear completely. Nobody likes change so we can either embrace it or live in the past.

Not a fan of the Edge laptops myself, I much prefer the L and T series with their drip tray thingy built in to the keyboard and they're robustness is second to none!

One thing I learnt when I worked in the IT Services department at a college was that the more you locked the computers down, the more ways they found to either bugger them up or get around the lock down. In the end we stopped locking them down and implemented HD Guard so they could do whatever they liked to the machines and one reboot later the machines were back to normal with any changes they've made gone. Support calls went down dramatically and up-time of the PCs improved exponentially! At the School I work at we've recently reminded the staff about Impero and now if a user is not doing what they are supposed to the teacher just blocks their internet connection or blanks all their screens so they have to pay attention to what they are saying.

Stick it in your airing cupboard at home for a day or two to see if that draws out any moisture.

The little rascals! You could always look in to using AppLocker in a Group Policy (in a GPO it's listed as Application Control Policies). There's a bit of work to do but that will most probably solve the issue for you.

We're offering it to Staff who want it and putting it on all new laptops for them but have no plans in the immediate future to install it in the classrooms. We're currently upgrading our servers to 2012 so once that's done we'll look in to seeing what the benefits of installing it in the classrooms would be and make a decision that way.

We use Microsoft FEP as its included in our licence agreement, it works well and saved us money by not having to pay extra for an AntiVirus solution.

I'll have to agree with the others on this one, you're going to have to do a fresh installation from scratch. Do you have a build log? If not I'd recommend creating one, just a tick-sheet with the software you install on particular computers.

As long as it's documented it doesn't matter what you use. Always stick with Grey for computer to network points as thats the most common (and therefore cheapest) colour. Red is always good for important links that you mustnt touch such as uplinking switches together and connecting your router(s) to your network. Other than that, the world is your oyster!

That's the best way of dealing with Staff if you ask me!

Ask for a demo unit and some free toner to try it out and you'll find out for youself.

It's the power supplies at fault as I took one from a working one and it powers on OK with that one. No luck in finding a power supply via Google so they're now out of action

Cleaning didn't make any difference. I even took it outside and gave it a good air dusting - wow there was a lot of loose toner in the mechanism as it formed a great big dust cloud in the car park!!! I swapped it out for the one in our office and it now prints OK and I have a replacement on order to sort our one out