twin--turbo

Motor Vehicle related trades should shift their work days too Garages do half days saturday and close sunday which fits badly with the availability of the populus to visit them. The motor factors that supply them should follow suit. TT

Not convinced it would make much difference. For myself and a good proportion of the UK we work a standard working week Monday to Friday. We then have 1 and a half days to visit a shop . My organisation is a Financial Service Provider, traditionaly in our sector 15 years ago it was a 9-4 Monday to Friday Operation for customers. We now have normal opening 6 days 9-5, with customer services telco open 8-8M-F and 10-4 Sat and Sun. There are rumours of Sunday opening in the future as that's what modern life demands. We are closed On Christmas Day and Bank Holiday monday. But Staff are still doing work behind the sceens and Indeed I am on call. TT

Still using a Classic Wii and a Xbox Crystal although new games are not available for the latter.. TT

I wish we could abolish sunday trading laws. I don't see why shops have to shut, plenty of people are happy to work christmas. And generaly will get paid better if they do. I did a couple of christmas days working in I.T. to do DataProcessing routines from Christmas eve and to prepare for Boxing Day. For a large UK Clothing Retailer. Although I was a little annoyed that my lunchtime "relife" staff member did not turn up as he had had a skinfull by lunchtime.. TT

Although it's the case here that we can't easily go to another exchage it is more than possible to have diverse routing to different exchanges. It's how soon it splits after your building that counts. If it is one exchange then the service should be split between different equipment racks so that a failuer of one rack does not affect both links. The big question is how is traffic handled , are they in effect one connection that's split at your site and rejoined at the exchange( so presenting one IP to the outside world) , or two seperate independant services with their own IP. TT

Too many variables and too little information. Idealy work out the max energy consumption of all devices. That should give you a KVA figure or wattage. You then need a cooler to match or idealy go N+1 if you don't want to be called out in the middle of the night to shut down overheating servers ( done that a few times in the past ). If your a fairly small server estate then your probably looking at 3.5Kva being ok , depending on how difficult the route to the external condenser unit is the more costly it would be but figure on £1.5K for a install. If the room is overly big for the amount of equipment you will be wasting energy, so if you can solve the relocation issue by a basic stud wall and that would be good. But it will be more important to have N+1 as you will have much faster thermal runaway in a small room if the cooler fails. 3.5Kva will use arround 3.5KWH at full chat. at 11p a unit that's ~£9 a day. so £3.3K a year.. But that's going full on, which your very unlikly to do you may only see a third of that. Any local A/C company should be able to provide a free quote and advice. And finaly moving server rooms can be a nightmare. TT

No Password = No Encryption so traffic can be SNOOPED. Passwords and other sensetive data could be exposed. In the UK there is no legislation as to what has to be provided. In a school if your providing access you should be at the very least filtering and logging access. TT

Some raid controllers detect a configuration mismatch and will offer "Use raid configuration from disks or from controller" In this cases you can use the DISK option and it should work. I can't remember but it was probably on DELL Perc controllers but as they flipped between LSI MegaRaid And Adaptec ones all the time no idea what it was. It may even have been G5 DL3xx HP's As someone else has said it may be an idea to try and get a bit for bit copy to a file. Linux "dd" command will do that for you. TT

Gr8.. HP make it even more confusing. TT

rechargeables wherever possible. Bought 20 odd decent MAh Duracel AA's and similar AAA's , couple of PP3's .. cost a bit but they will last for years. TT

Having used ( Dell , Cisco , HP ProCurve and HP Comware ) over the last 8 years there is only one I would not hesitate to recomend they have a logo with a Bridge... Dell servers though... I would buy them over HP or Cisco. Bought 5 R730 in May to replace R810's and Looking at 5 more to replace HP DL380 G7/G8's .

Internet is littered with time issues on Vmware. It may have improved on 5.5 which we moved to in the summer. Our XenServer farm was also getting well out of sync. I found these after I started with the company in Feb2014 and after attempting a number of fixes the combination of the Linux NTP servers and Physical DC have fixed all time issues with the exception of the Phone systems that is always ~15s behind! TT

I think somone has to bite the bullet and buy a new box. Running a 9 year old server in production for critical services is going to end in misery sooner or later. TT

I have 2 prime reasons. 1) Time sync is crap on a virtual DC and causes all sorts of problems. Time problems extended to our NETAPP filers and other systems that referenced the Virtual DC. We now run 2 Physical Linux Time Servres(on at Prime and one at DR site) and the Physical PDC-E gets time from them. 2) in the event of a catastrophic failure of the Hypervisor Cluster, I still want to be able to log into my PC easily to begin trouble shooting. TT

Sit Rep update.. Newman - ( Sorry It's Colin not Mark ) Been in contact with Colin and They should be reopening in temporary accomodation in time for JAN. Lots of work to do but the servers were safe and I understand are in their own temporary accomodation till they can be moved. A hill of work to do but there are a number of people supporting the efforts . I have been fortunate to be able to offer 3days of whatever thanks to my Employer allowing all staff member 3 days paid leave to help the community. Trinity - Again closed until the new year, not spoken to Sutherland but assume they are not as badly affected as the rest. RRCA - Spoken to them a few times and they have done great work despite problems with ISP's The Bridge..... ARG... Both the road bridge and seperate foot bridge across the river remain closed. Diving Engineers have been unable to start assesment work on the road bridge but it's understood that the piers already had scouring damage that if it has been serverly exasperated could undermine the foundations. It's hoped that they may be able to start the survey tomorrow but it's a gloomy prospect if it gets the thumbs down traffic is still chaotic. TT

lol leaky aircon... Last time I had that was in 97, used to dump water over a Data General Aviion unix box in winter.. That was untill this year when I found one of our coolers at our DR site blowwin water drop into our DR Citrix cluster due to silting in the bilge pump. We have upgraded our moisture ingress monitor to cover the whole of the DR server room perimiter. TT

P.S. If going virtual make sure you have 1 Physical DC, it's recomended that this is the FSMO roll holder. As a guide we are presently being quoted... Dual CPU 18 Core Dell R730, 256GB ram , 10Gb lan, (disks we dont care much about due to SAN) 5 year Warranty 24/7/365/4hr at about £11K that will easily run 40-50 VM's ... So scale that down a bit (12core was about 4k cheaper) . I forget what I used to pay years ago but we probably had 10 Physical servers that cost 2-3K each. And doing a hardware upgrade was a nightmare ( not with Virtual! ) TT

In my last job we had to join a Netware 6.5/OES based network with a AD network maintaing all the good bits whislt avoiding unseteling a politicaly charged apple cart. That was then moved to a new AD domain after 2.5 years over the space of 2-3 weeks with a new domain with user account anems having been changed (political) causing lots of re-mapping work to be done. Then we added a second site to the domain from a third school again with the same name changes. The 1st stage worked realy well, 2nd and 3rd caused a number of permisson issues. If you think the domain is a mess then take the plunge, but build along side the existing and plan for a summer cut over. I no longer have the luxury of "SUMMER" but over this summer we did do a seeamless migration of our systems from old "NetAPP Filer" , "ESX 5.0 on Dell R810" "HP5406 Switch" to new "Netapp Filer" , "ESX 5.5 on Dell R730", "HP Comware 5700FF 10G" Switch. Everything was migrated live with no downtime at all. And VEEAM is cracking!! TT

Definatly on VM's Personaly as a starting point I would use VMware free edition or "Essentials Plus" Gone through all sorts of scenarios of network rebuilds in the last 7 years.. TT

2.5FT Minimum based on updated experience.... Realisticaly I would say go 1st floor, although that does present structural issues if your loading a few hundred kilos per rack. TT

PS... What I would say if your a Network Manager. Is have a DR Plan. It could be flood, fire, or other disaster. Plan what you need, What has to be on line and when, Your Backups work, You have a device to restore the backups, You have your Disaster file with the plan and all the details of suppliers, contacts, etc. Your Coms circuits. Client Access. You may think it is not to relevant in a school but it realy realy does matter. If you don't have SIMS/PARS/etc up and able to server data in 48hrs of a disaster then I.T. is seriously hindering recovery. TT

It's strangely better and worse than 2005. Less has flooded, but the areas flooded were hit higher for longer. The waters receeded faster in 2005, the main bridge was probably closed less than 24hrs. Fortunatly our northern bypass ( which has been mooted since the 70's) was approved and finished 3-4 years ago. without it transport would be totaly devestated. presently there is no way to get from southern to northern carlisle without a 3-4 mile trip.. I can wave at someone across the closed link but getting to walk to them is a mamouth task. If the Civil Engineers give the bridge the thumbs down then there will have to be some very in depth talks over travel and traffic routing as the gridlock at peak hours is not good. i am a pesemist though.. so things can only get better..

Yep bit of a woops moment up here. Thought I would check in see how the Dry Contingent are So Those that remember I moved to pastures new 22 Months ago and work for a Local Large Mutual Financial organissation ranked 10th amoung it's peers. We are 95% fine with little disruption other than one branch being flooded badly. We will sort that as soon as our fantastic teams will manage. We got off very lightly although it's been a more manic week than usual. But going back to my education days, and I know my ex colleauges have much less time on their hands... The floods in Carlisle did not come as a surprise on Sunday morning, Despite the fantastic defenses that have saved £180M+ of damage over the last 5-6 years paying for themselfs. The sheer quantity of rain, on top of 3 previous weeks of rain was far too much to comprehend. Strangely there is hardly any sign now, the rive is back in the channel... For myself it's made little difference other than travel to work, the only city bridge over the river has been closed since saturday and is potentialy closed to next week at the very least. The impact on traffic has been heavy with the motorway and bypass routes being over saturated at rush hour. I took my car to work on Monday and gave up and left it there. Today I started early to miss rush hour but even at 4:30 it was nearly at saturation point. So Onto our schools.. I can only realy comment on Secondarys and only on what I know. Trinity has suffered bad flooding and I assume "Sutherland" is making every effort he can to get whatever services he needs to back on line. I suspect they have come of best of the "Triad" of schools in the river area as they are high up. My own Sons secondary school next door lies the lowest of them all. It was devasteded in the 2005 Flood but they bounced back. We all have a strong spirit round here and I suspect the management will have a good written plan. Not good that my lad is not at schoold thought!!!!! "MARK" will be co-ordinating his efforts to re-equip damaged areas. His server room is 1st floor so hopefully got away with no damage to them. My old work Richard Rose Central Academy also sufferd badly, but Mark Wood (Now Main NM) rescued the critical systems from the server room on Saturday. The Academy is on the site of my original employer St Aidans. The guys are working very hard and have Decampped to the sister site RR Morton where they have brought critical systems back on line. Doing sterling work and working the DR plan we kinda discussed. I wish I was there! RRMorton, Closed to provide community support. Not sure if it's running but the guys have Central to concentrate on. I have been in contact with the RR guys and wish I had time to provide more help. I learned a whole heap in the 2k5 Flood of St-Aidans , and also know the RR Systems quite well despite the time gap. Provided some info this evening to help with one issue which hopefully will get sorted one of the 3 ways... Lots of questions to be answered by lots of parties. But as always we will bounce back stronger and harder.. TT

So both screens light on another system but not on this system. Certainly sounds like the fuse for the backlight has blown on the motherboard. Rob

To Be honest, If your earning £8/h now you may struggle to achive that for a few years in Education I.T. as a junior tech. And the ongoing prospects are not great. Do your research and find out what the pay and conditions are like before going into Educatio I.T., and indeed any I.T. support role. It's not the highly paid career that eveyone outside belives. Rob