truebluesteve

I'm thinking more of bike v bike or bike v pedestrian, which although probably quite rare too is still a consideration. As for them being keen on self-preservation, they are no doubt of that mind but I think complacency is probably more likely the reason.

That's true to a point - however accidents do happen regardless of how safe an environment is. Clearly it isn't a concern for the Dutch!

I have been to Denmark quite a few times and never really noticed! The fact that it was so good in Rotterdam has stuck in my mind. One odd thing though is that very few people wear a cycle helmet

I was visiting my son in Rotterdam recently (he is studying at Uni there) and the cycle lanes are just superb with traffic lights and and proper junctions. Now admittedly Rotterdam was flattened in WWII so they rebuilt it with wide roads and cycle paths in mind but it shows what can be done

Aren't pavements meant for cyclists (er.. bike users) anyway, so what's the issue!

Totally agree about the errant motorists - I was just keeping to the topic of cyclists otherwise my rant would never end! The thing with cyclists is that you are extremely vulnerable to the poor driving/complacency of other road users so why put yourself at extra risk by riding without lights, on your mobile, without a helmet and ignore traffic signals. Beats me!

As I pulled up at a junction the other night a cyclist (because that's what he is in the same way as idiot motorists are still motorists) who was riding on the pavement with no lights, went straight across the road in front of me. He never looked - he probably didn't have time because he was travelling so fast. Fortunately I was able to stop in time but a split second later it might have been a completely different scenario. While I get that 'proper' cyclists don't behave in this way, there are an awful lot of people on bikes - possible even the majority of those that I see, that just don't give a t*ss about other road users or pedestrians.

Really liking your Intranet @SovietRussia - is it based on SharePoint? Our offering is somewhat simpler and which we are looking to change as its mainly in Flash and quite awkward to manipulate

It might be worth attempting a repair (or finding someone who can at a reasonable price) but failing that it depends on how much washing you are doing. I have a Hotpoint washer dryer and it cost around £300 and has worked really well, but I only need use it once a week as a rule. If you are washing a ton of stuff every day then it will be worth investing a bit more - Miele for example (I had one and the quality and service is superb).

Ours has a HP Probook 450 G2 with an SSD - really nice laptop and core i5 with 3 years RTB will be about £450 tops

We've been using Dell Optplex 3030's for our desktop devices in classrooms and the 3020 elsewhere and they build fine with no need to add any additional drivers (mostly anyway). We use HP for laptops and we have to add a couple of drivers after the build has completed, but its not a big issue. We could actually add them to the build, but just haven't got round to it! Edit - To add, we buy our PC's from various suppliers (although Misco mainly at the moment)

Well I feel your pain - our server room has two a/c units and they have both failed twice with very nearly catastrophic results. After the 2nd time we had the Daikin units completely removed and replaced with Mitsubishi ones, and all has been good so far. We do have a climate monitor which emails me if the temperature rises but obviously if it happens overnight then it could be a while before it gets noticed. Anyway hope you get yours sorted quickly!

Absolutely - it is really hard to get people to appreciate that you can't compare a standalone home PC with a networked one and all the different things it has to do just to log on! I like to remind people that even the largest organisations have system breakdowns and yet they have huge budgets and teams of experts to support them - not just a NM and a couple of technicians :-) How many times have you phoned a call centre and been told by the person at the other end "I'm sorry, the system is running slowly today"?

Does anything happen network wise happen after school - automatic shutdown of PC's, remote backups? If so, might be worth disabling them for one evening to see if it changes anything

I agree - quickest (but most inconvenient) is to disconnect one switch at a time from your core switch (assuming you have one of course) whilst pinging a known problem IP. When the ping is stable you've found your dodgy switch and you can break it down from there.

This is true - but we've had storms via loops on exactly the same Netgear switches as the OP and they fall over pretty quickly! They are quite an old model now and are pretty much entry level in terms of specification. I'd be unplugging a few ports at a time from the switch and seeing if the problem reappears - if not plug them back in and do a few more. It does mean a few PC's may be out of action but if it happens regularly then it shouldn't be for too long. The only problem with this approach is if you have more than one loop/dodgy network card, but I think its worth a punt.

Its great - I'm in the start area scrapping and building stuff. Hoping to get tomorrow off, and if so it will be more of the same!

No I actually meant both trying to access the tape library - not even at the same time. Veeam couldn't seem to access it if the BE services were running. Otherwise our setup is similar to yours!

No you can't use both together - I had to stop the BE services otherwise Veeam complained. Veeam is on its own VM whilst BE is on an old server 2003 physical box. I'd use Veeam for your VMs and leave the BE/tapeloader to backup SIMS and any other physical boxes.

Been using Veeam for a while and its pretty good, but to answer your questions 1. Not as far as I know 2. Yes - forward and reverse incrementals 3. Backup and replication enterprise essentials is what I have and will be fine for you I think 4. No - its done on the number of physical sockets on your hosts. They do them in bundles of 2 sockets (well they did when we got ours) 5. I use Redstor as my duplicate (cloud-based) backup. Its not as cheap as tape but its a lot less hassle! We also have a tape library (Overland Neo) which does work with Veeam but it wasn't that reliable - it would often skip folders if it couldn't enumerate them and seemed to take quite a long time. Its also a lot less flexible that either Veeam for VM's or Backup exec. I have gone back to using BE2010 to back up a very large share Hope this helps

All I can say that in my experience that when someone loops out 2 network ports we see the effects pretty quickly, and they return just as quickly if the switch is reset. I'm not saying it isn't a loop its just seems odd that it appears to be happening so randomly

I would have expected the problem to be there all the time if it were a permanent loop - although of course it could be an intermittent one if someone is maliciously doing it. Also in my experience the switch recovers when the loop has been removed after a couple of minutes. You could set a continuous ping to the switch and remove the cables from it one at a time and see if it comes back up. If you want to try the Gbic option and need spares then let me know as I have a load of Netgear ones here (they don't work in HP switches)

We had a load of those switches and on the whole they were very reliable but as they aged they seemed to be less so. Couple of things worked for us when we had similar issues to yours 1. Replaced the Gbic's (You don't say whether they use fibre uplinks or not) 2. Do a complete factory reset as opposed to a 'soft' reset Even though it shouldn't be the cause of your problem, I would give the core switch a static IP at some point. We have replaced all of our netgear switches (well, bar four of them) with HP ones instead.

Just to get you in the mood It does speed up at the end which seems wrong!

I'm very excited - mine should arrive for the PS4 today! As for the graphics - I'm not sure why people seem to get obsessed by them - Fallout and Bethesda games in general have always been about the gameplay. Yep there will be bugs (Skyrim on the PS3 anyone?) but they do open-world so very well and I have forgiven them in advance :-)