Joedetic

Hi Tom, thanks but I've had a couple of offers in the mean time. One of which I accepted. I must say though the place where I'm actually going to be going on placement (my school where I did some voluntary work previously) were most impressed that I'd been speaking with someone at Smoothwall about a placement heh heh. I may have to come to you post-graduation to see what you've got then

Bye bye wedding ring.....

*cough* Silly name *cough*

I would have thought there'd have been a way to use DRBD to do this....oh well.

If you're going for Mac Minis can't you run a DRBD system on them?

Or you could preserve your resources for the virtualisation and run a headless Linux installation with either VMWare or Xen or Virtualbox or something like that

There is floating around somewhere on the internet a floppy disk image for this. I think I've got a copy somewhere...I know you can do it because I've imaged a VMWare VM using pxe boot from the WDS server before (back when it was RIS though). +_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+ I lie....it would appear that the .vfd file I have is for MS Virtual PC I think...but you /can/ mount a floppy drive or make a floppy image to boot if you've got a PXE boot disk already...maybe that would work?

I don't like what Tiscali told you. I ran a web sever from a Tiscali connection for the longest time up until about ~9 months ago and it'll be going back soon. It wasn't in the AUP that we agreed to when we got the connection (they've probs changed it) that you can't run a webserver but what they don't want is open relays. That is to say SMTP servers that allow the relaying of any messages without authentication or restriction because it can heavy bandwidth on their network if someone were to find your server and abuse it. To be honest though, you could do better than Tiscali. I've been running a web server and a whole host of other servers from my Virgin Media 20Mbit cable for the last ~9 months whilst I've been at uni.

Epic John...just....epic. Thank God I'm only 50% English

I like marmite too...I also like black pudding...and liver and sambucca (not really a food but nice anyway). I don't like avocado and i'm sure there's other things but i've forgotten them. Oooh i'm not particularly fond of new potatoes because of the way the skin on them breaks under your teeth...*shivers and wretches a little*

Cheers, I'll take a looksee

@Geoff, I don't know at the moment but by the time I've got to do stuff to them I will. Cheers

Yeah. GVRP wasn't on the CCNA 3 syllabus...vtp was that's how I know about it. 802 standards I expected. Are the commands different such as enable, and show etc etc etc?

The Cisco switches are noisy too tbh, but you can replace the fans as Geoff said. One of the things I love about VLANs on Cisco kit is VTP. I'll be going back into a HP environment soon and will have a lot more to do with the switches than I did before, what are the main differences between HP CLI and Cisco IOS CLI?

If you're doing CCNA/CCNP route make sure you can count...preferrably in binary (joking...you get taught that bit). I have terrible troubles with my maths and that made learning to subnet a bit awkward to begin with. I also failed my maths module last semester because I've just never been any good at basic maths...then they go and stick me with laplace and z transforms!

I wasn't implying that RM was bad. You'll notice that I said "poorly utilised." My view on design choice is whatever works for you. (It all links into my philosophy on distro wars.) And I totally agree with you Russ. I was just echoing the sentiments of some people I've spoken to.

Something I've noticed amongst my own peers is that they seem quite descriminate of the education sector because all they've ever seen are naff networks with poorly utilised RM CC stuff and things like that with old hardware. They don't seem to understand just how much funding technology college status brings in etc and how much enterprise class hardware educational techs actually see. Blind to the world they don't know I suppose...

Am I the only one that owns a pair of waders? (I'm counting them as very big wellies seeing as their thigh waders, thus shoes )

Well yeah, if you're using it to backup virtual machines...i was planning host OS backup...or doesn't it work like that?

Well a company I had an interview a while ago were explaining about this being used for their backup process. They weren't using Xen but VMware on Gentoo. I had origionally wanted to learn to do this on FreeBSD but if it's going into the school where they'll have to support it when i'm gone i'm thinking maybe Debian/Ubuntu. Again...it's something I need to play with in VMs before I start in June. Out of interest (because I'm not entirely sure myself) what's the restore process? Just SCP the files back or something? But what if you've got to do an entire restore of a box?

Que indeed. I was discussing DCs a while back with someone I know who's had a lot of experience in D.Cs but it would appear that he likes to overly simplify stuff and miss things out. Yes I've heard of N+1. But if you can't afford three phase power feeds and don't want to buy fancy UPSs then bodge jobbing is something I'm sure he's good at.

Yeah it all looks like it could be quite complicated for what I'd want it for anyway..that and I'd need to look at locating a machine at the other end of the site connected by fibre or something so as not to pull huge load on the network.

*sigh* how about you just wait there whilst I go and shoot some one. Ok?

Yeah that's sort of the idea. Take one from a UPS on one ring main and one from another UPS on another ring main. I mean, if you were designing a data centre you'd have each on different generators etc too. It's all about redundancy these days. Teamed NICs and failover is good too.

It's not an appropriate method for you to use for this, but something I keep meaning to take a look at is for Linux and it's DRBD (Distributed replication block device or something like that). Another machine on the network acts as a local block device and you can get it to replicate all blocks on the hard drive to the DRBD box which then takes regular snapshots and saves those so it's a very comprehensive sytem of live backup. (Essentially mirroring with archiving) In your situation I'd go with rsync. The initial sync will take a while over a WAN link though.