Disease

Hang on the words Pot Kettle Calling and Black spring to mind didn't you say you wanted to put in Microsoft, that would be destroying competition as well. Nope, getting rid of one monopolist is not the same as getting rid of the only 2 things that could possibly drive innovation within said monopolist. But you are picking which ones you consider to be the poorer party, who says that by putting Microsoft into the room you destroy innovation because the 2 smaller companies no longer have to fight big bad Microsoft. Now that they have 50% each of the market place instead of the 10% they had between them they they no longer feel the need to innovate so they just sit and stagnate. All three destinies are entwined together you see

Hang on the words Pot Kettle Calling and Black spring to mind didn't you say you wanted to put in Microsoft, that would be destroying competition as well. 1. Tony Blair and all his labour twatheads. 2. Immigrants (all of them) 3. Dumb people with loads of kids. 4. Lazy People 5. Non Patriotic People

cool, Off Topic but I lived in Brisbane for 12 years.

We hold the old year 11's work for 12 months then delete it. I am not sure if there is any specific legislation and would be interested in sources if there is.

Not being funny, mate, but how on earth do you know that? Well seeing as I am a Network Manager and he is a Network Manager I can pretty much say I would do the same sort of things if not more, seeing as we do not contract anything out at all (due to the fact that I have jake working for me ).

How exactly does Cat5E kill people? What are they going to do, eat it and choke on it?

I do agreewith you on that matter that you mdo need to get decent clauses in any contracts.

Well said. I am not trying to have a go at anyone or say they should do it this way or that, what I have is the "I am not trained to do that" culture and the H&S culture that is killing this country. What ever happened to the "I got off my arse and learned to do it myself" culture. Thats what we need more of.

Maniac just get yourself a decent cable tester they cost around £1500 but are worth it if you install your own cable, it runs all the certification tests and allows you to print warranties. Well worth it, then there is no arguement as to whether your cable is certified. Thats all outside companies do.

You will always continue to try and find some small excuse as to why you should not do it, so therefore the arguement we are having is pointless, you don't want to do it and thats fine. I have the same things to do that you have to do and I still managed to do al my own installs with my team.

I am a Network Manager as well, but I suppose it depends on what sort of Network Manager you are, I am a hands on best Value for money for my school type of network manager.

Disease How are you testing your cables? How do you source your parts. Cheapest? or looking at specs etc.. We use a computerised Cable tester that gives and saves all informnation about the run. Bit offensive saying you wouldn't employ me when you don't know me. If you had the report on the 10 years worth of cabling that i inherited it may current school it would make you think more about paying to get it done right and right first time. It's not offensive, I just would not hire you if you could not cable, same as I would not hire you if you were not willing to use power tools. when you see a real proffesional do it with the twists right down to the module, the lack of compression and clean pull throughs then you might know what i am talking about. I know what you are talking about Hope you keep your cable runs away from power, water, gas and flourescent appliences. If you use basket tray i hope you also use liners as you will end up getting compression points in time if you havn't. Do you cable tie? another source of compression! Yes and no we don't cable tie do you lable your trays for data only so that in a years time an electrician won't think 'i'll run my cable along that'. Yes, I have a good relationship with the school electricians Do you ensure that contractors are aware that they can't use your data runs and if so do you check this? yes I'm talking from bitter experience but could call you nieve. How? Hope your not doing the electrical work on your whiteboard installs? Or are you NIC EIC approved It would be illegal for me to run anything other than an extension, we get an electrician in to feed power where we need it. The guarantee does not cover you if: Someone drills through the cables Vandalism to the cable Vandalism to the sockets As there are no moving parts is the reason why they are happy to give a 20 year guarantee as there is nothing that can go wrong. unless someone inteferes with the cable nothing will go wrong with it.

Why would things go wrong, if you test and certify the cable, what is there to go wrong. It's different if you are by yourself then it's hard to devote the time to do it, but if there is more than 1 person in the team then time should not be an issue. We have a large network here with nearly 20 servers we find time to do ALL our own cabling, we have never had a failure and we have never had anything go wrong. In fact just this last summer we re-wired an IT room as it was wired incorrectly by a cabling company. If we required a guarantee for everything it would be a nightmare. What sort of Guarantee do you give the school that Active Directory will work fine, what sort of guarantee do you give that your backup solution will work fine. Thats the trouble with this country today, too many people try to find ways not to do something rather than just getting on and doing it. Next you will be telling me I should waste £2000 a time on a whiteboard and projector install with an outside contractor.

Sounds to me like an excuse tbh, just my personal opinion though. How can you be in network management and not know how to cable properly and effectively, after all it's a basic task. In fact if you didn't know how to cable I would not even consider employing you to work for me.

As Jake said we do everything here, as for a 20 year guarantee whats the point, we will not be using the same cable in 20 years anyway, we probably won't be using the same in 10 years.

The hint is in your question, you can't have 2 servers wih the same name on the network. We had 'Mailserver' and then made a new server called 'mailserver_new', its simple really.

Why not just re-setup the Exchange 2007 server and call it Mailserver_new then migrate the mailboxes using the mailbox migration tool that is available. The length of time you are waiting for a solution to the initial problem you could have had it up and running by now. Bite the bullet and reinstall is what I would do.

What point calibration are you set at? We use 20 point callibration here and never had a problem.

He said there was no real need. He said no need which is a statement of fact you said no real need which isnt' a statement of fact. I ma saying that to say there is no need (Fact) is incorrect. Active Directory directory service provides the means to manage the identities and relationships that make up network environments. Saying that Windows 2003 domain structure should be just as secure as 2 seperate networks, that's the whole point of active directory is also incorrect. Two physically seperate networks is always going to be more secure. I am sure the Linux users here would testify that you don't need Active Directory or Windows 2003 to have a secure network.

Disagree with that there is always a need for added security. My networks are ultra secure but I still like the comfort of having seperate networks and I will never change on that. We have 2 networks here and a stack of servers.

Why do you want to change the subnet mask? you can't have used all the available ips on a range unless you have a network the size of Microsofts? Example here we use x.x.10.x for client ip's and to expand it by another 255 we just used x.x.11.x and to expand it further we could use x.x.12.x.

@altecsole I don't want to test them, I want to play around with my GPO design, create new policies, etc. I only want to do this for design purposes only. I only want to sit and sift through gpo at leisure as I don't have enough time at work to revamp it. Will look into the VMware solution.

I don't want to have to sit at the server making up various GPO's or via remote desktop.. I would rather sit at home on my laptop work through various policies and then bring them into work to test on a test ou.

Anyone know of any software that allows you to create GPO's offline i.e on a XP/Vista machine and then allows you to import it over to a server later?