mattstevenson2005

Hi Everyone We are replacing and upgrading all of our servers and we are recreating our entire domain so that means we can have new server names. At the moment we have boring names based on their role. Does anybody have any ideas, was thinking LCARS, Enterprise, Voyager etc.. big Star Trek fan we have 14+ servers so we need quite a few names and also got to bear in mind that we are a school and pupils see the names so they cant be rude Dam!! lol Any ideas would be great!! Matt

We are just having a new storage network installed and we have 2 SANs (2x Fujitsu SX80) that permanently replicate each other all the time, these are stored in two separate data centres on opposite ends of the school site then one of the SANs plug directly in to the fibre robotic tape library (Fujitsu TX24 LTO4) which can process up to 35Tb per backup.

Hi Everyone I have a bunch of IT teachers asking me if i can allow students to copy music on to the school network for use in their IT courcework. I currently block audio and video file with file server manager in server 2003 R2 as i understand it to be illegal. I have looked on google and everything i read says that it is illegal for the use of copyrighted music e.g. music by comerical artists (n dubz, lady gaga etc..) in schools with out permission. Is this right or are we allowed to have music on the network for in school use e.g. coursework? Thanks Matt

Hi Guys We are in the process of buying some new workstations and was wondering does anyone use any hard glass TFT screens (to stop kids smashing them) if so what make, model etc... if they are any good Cheers Matt

Thanks, i have worked it out. It was because the default web chaining rule was forwarding all requested up to the upstream LEA proxy and not resolving local addresses internally LOL my fault Cheers Matt

we have a load of hp proliant servers and we use the HP network configuration utility to team our network cards. the network cards must be the hp ones and must be able to support teaming. I think you need to have the HP management software installed. it does not create a shortcut on the start menu for the teaming utility i found it by typing in cpqteam.exe in to the windows search option that is the config utility you need to team your nics Cheers Matt

Hi Ash Thanks for the answer, im not quite sure what you mean. Because of the way our internet is supplied by the local council our internal DCs cannot 'see' any 10.15 address. We use the ISA to NAT all traffic from the 10.15 network to our internal network. I already have a forwarder setup to point to an external DNS server on our main DC which is also our primary DNS server Cheers Matt

Give johanne smith a ring at ccs media (08445611476) we have used her for over 5 years and she allways gets the best price compared to all other companies. Cheers Matt

Hi Everyone I have an ISA setup as our gateway to the internet and i am trying to use the web publishing feature but i am having a few problems with it. When i try and access an internal web server from the actual ISA server it cannot find the page, therefore the web publishing for that site doesnt work. Does anybody have any idea why the ISA cannot access the internal web pages. Both the ISA and the web server can see and access each other e.g. through file shares/ping etc.. but just cant access the actual web page. The ISA has two network cards in, one internal and one external Internal 172.16.0.10 IP Address 255.255.0.0 Subnet NO Default Gateway 172.16.0.1 Primary DNS 172.16.0.3 Secondary DNS External - DETAILS SUPPLIED BY LEA 10.15.80.14 IP Address 255.255.0.0 Subnet 10.15.3.254 Default Gateway 10.15.250.160 Primary DNS 10.15.250.161 Secondary DNS Every thing else seams to work internet access is fine, its just accessing the internal web servers and web publishing that im having problems with Cheers Matt

Thanks for the link, thats great, the capita site is crap for searching LOL Matt

I have tried to search for that KB ID but support net doesnt find anything, does anyone have a direct link? cheers matt

Thanks guys Do you think the DFS will work ok with the sims share? Cheers Matt

Hi Everyone Just wanted to get some feedback on my ideas. We are having all our servers replaced in July and I was wondering if we could cluster our Sims servers to provide failover support. What I am thinking of is to have two servers running the full version of SQL 2005 with load balancing enabled. Then to provide failover for the SIMS s:\ drive to use some sort of DFS distributed file system software to mirror the Sims folder across the two servers. Has anybody else got this set, or looking to something like this, any help would be great Cheer Matt

3 years from support technician to network manager now

CCS Media are the best i use them for everything they always get the best pricing call Johanne Smith on 08445611476 (shes on holiday until 29/04/09) but shes the best. Can get what ever you want e.g. standard HP PCs or custom built HP PCs we are a full HP school cant fault them at all! all our machines are custom built to order. Matthew

Hi Guys Thanks for getting back to me about this; I have a bit more information now about this. The way that we are looking to do it is each student will record their own video, and then download it to the Macs (local hard drive) then they can work on their project. Then at the end of the lesson they simply copy their final cut project folder (including the recording) up to the XRAID then at their next lesson they copy the project back to the local Mac hard drive and carry on working. The main Mac room is going to be on a gigabit switch (HP 2848) and the XSERVE/XRAID is going to be connected to our secondary core switch (HP 2924 which will be in the second server room in the same cab as the 2848) with 2 gigabit load balanced links between the two switches. Then if a student wants to access there Mac files from another PC/MAC somewhere else in school then the information from the XSERVE/XRAID will come over our 10Gb fibre link from the secondary core switch to our primary core switch (HP 5406zl located in the primary server room) and then over the gigabit fibre connected edge switches to the requesting client. Can anybody see any foreseeable problems e.g. with the suggested SATA hard drives in the XRAID or with network bandwidth, as I’m not 100% convinced that the SATA hard drives would be quick enough to cope with the amount of data we are asking it to deal with. Also I have to bear in mind that our school is looking to get six form status in the next 1-2 years so that will properly add allot more Macs in to the equation as we are already have art college status and the media side I’m sure will progress in to the six form. Thanks for everybody’s comments it’s been a real help! Cheers Matthew

no the macs cant take esata disks

hey mark i raise that bet by $10 lol, when do you come back? just bought the sophos ws1000 at last! its RMA teaching with KSY they have macbook pros now ive got one too AED replaced his old one and got me one as well a nice 17" one lol there a bit big though! we are having a new building built specially for the mac room so should be good, also getting a new office built at last! lol, you will have to come and see it when its finished. Anyway enjoy your last few weeks c u soon matt

Hi Guys We are currently in the process of completely re-designing our school networks, we are looking at replacing all our current servers with a number of servers and a replicated SAN setup we are also installed a Mac network with at least 30 iMacs running final cut studio and my question is we are going to be separating the windows/Mac network storage areas by using a separate XRAID for the Mac network with SATA drives, do you think these drives will be fast enough to cope with 30+ student copying large final cut files over the network or do we really need SAS drives? the XSERVE will not be doing any of the final cut rendering we are going to be using the local machines to do all the hard work then at the end of the lesson students copy their final cut folder back up to the XRAID, then if they do any word/office stuff this will be stored on the replicated windows SAN. If anyone else uses final cut studio (the full version not express) how to you have this setup? Do you have a central SAN like we are looking at or do you use local storage and not store it any ware on the network? Any help or advice would be really useful. Forgot to mention the apples and window clients will be on the same active directory so they the student can access both the apple and windows SANs from any workstation be it either windows or Mac around the school. Cheers Matt

Hi Has anybody got any idea if SIMS.net and FMS work on 2008 64bit. My current setup is windows 2003 R2 32bit but i am looking to upgrade all my servers and i want to upgrade the SIMS server too. I have been testing the server 2008 64bit setup all the SIMS apps e.g. doc server, manuals,SIMS Applications seam to be working ok and installed without any problems but when i come to restore the database using DBATTACH.exe /RESTOREUI it seams to work but then i get the error message "RegCreateKeyEx() returned error 5, 'Access is denied' Configuration option 'show advanced options' changed from 0 to 1. Run the RECONFIGURE statement to install" If anybody has any ideas how i can fix this i would be most greatful Regards Matthew Stevenson

make sure you have installed the windows 9 encoder series

Give that head a metal he must value high quality in house IT services over wasting TAX payers money. I wish all other heads were as cleaver but some can only see pound signs £ when BSF comes a knocking. All the other heads should follow his example and crush this BSF scheme :):):)

Come on guys if you think about it really students aren’t going to be using Linux in a small/medium or large business as it’s just not practical, nearly all commercial software out there requires windows. I’m not saying Linux is no good because I’m not, I use Linux here at the school and at home for firewalls and phone systems but in reality Linux is not the most user friendly piece of software and I agree with the posts above if you have a problem you have to search the internet for hours hoping you find someone with the same problem it’s just not practical. Students should learn all different os's but seen as the whole world almost uses windows then that is what they should learn. windows is just great for beginners it’s so user friendly and the problems with services packs and updates are not an issue if you are careful as to using other os's in schools I have no problem we use windows, Mac os x and Linux on our network (Linux for one of our firewalls)

Hi all When i started my high school in 2000 i started to get involved in the IT department and helping with the network, the head of IT was really friendly and encouraged me to help out and learn how the network works. i was at the school until 2005 when i did my GCSE's and i left for college over the 2 years i was at college i was offered a part time job to assist with the network, after i finished my college cource i was offered a full time job as IT Technician and after 1 year fully employed i have a 55K budget and i am only 18!! (30k for major projects, 20k for contracts and about 5k for every day stuff) People that say school technicians dont see enterprise class hardware are totaly wrong at the moment we are investing in a 7k tape library for backups a 40K+ SAN soloution, the latest quad core HP prolient servers and top end HP procurve fibre switches!! technology in school has moved away from the typewriter!!. school networks experisence higher network load in one day then a medium sized business may experience in a week!! (you have 4-6 technicians for 100 computers in a business, in school we have 230+ computers 900+ users with only 2 of us, soon to be just 1 - me!) Over the last few months the techies were we are located joined together and formed a technical forum and we have been invited by the head of sophos education to visit there head offices in oxford and tour the sophos virus labs with there head of virus research. the education team travaled over 3 hours to give us a 10 minute presentation they are that impressed with our techical forum. will update you all when we get back we are going on the 22nd april so will let you know whats its like. just going back to the thread i total belive that if i had not been encouraged to work on the network at the age of 11 i would not be in the great job im in now so good luck to that eleven year old - good on ya!!