mikeyd101

We've used it here for about a year. Its very good, we didn't directly buy it, it came as part of our region center package (region center provide our inet connection, video conferencing, backup, mail filtering etc). We had an issue few months ago where the kids had got through the filter using hotspot shield (HSS) and tunnel bear. We spoke with the region center about it and we upgraded to the latest version of iBoss (which caused a few issues, reports stopped working) but they have everything sorted now and working like a champ including blocking HSS traffic.

We have an old server Xeon F4A, pretty sure its this one: ARK | 64-bit Intel® Xeon® Processor 3.00E GHz, 2M Cache, 800 MHz FSB currently running 2008 server I wanted to upgrade it to 2012r2 but can't get it to boot, stops with a 0x00000C4 error on boot I have done some searching and appears and found this: "For 64-bit installations of Windows 8.1 Preview, your CPU must also support CMPXCHG16b, PrefetchW and LAHF/SAHF." Which it appears may also be same requirement for 2012r2 and our old Xeon doesn't support. Anyone run into a similar problem? have any fixes? or can confirm no chance to run 2012r2 on that box. Thanks.

Airtime. Wifi only supports 1 client per radio at a time. Wifi all comes down to airtime and how much is available. We recently purchased a wi-spy dbx from metageek, a spectrum analyser to monitor and see where our airtime was choked or suffering from interference. It has already helped us get rid of a wireless speaker that was killing a 2.4 channel. Somethings that can help are moving clients to 5ghz, channel bonding and short guard interval. If your clients and access points support it can increase the bandwidth and reduce airtime of clients. Also check the channel configurations of adjacent APs and make sure there not talking on same channels (hard with 2.4). We have about 450+ clients on 37 Xirrus arrays across 3 campus, we are looking to upgrade as original design was for coverage now were looking for density. New plan is an array per classroom. If your having problems at lunchtimes, look at other outside interference such as microwaves, wireless speakers etc.

SovietRussia Looks very good, a couple of questions. How long did the system take you to develop? how come your using php/mysql for web interface, not c#/mssql/.asp/.net framework? Zezima it looks like there's cpu temp call MSAcpi_ThermalZoneTemperature in root\WMI but it also looks like its broken. Possibly you can write bespoke functions if you can find were to get a reliable cpu temp. I used a custom .MOF file (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc180827.aspx) to extract installed applications as the win32_product needs care of use as it can trigger dependacy install things to happen. This allows me to use wmi call sampleproductlist and sampleproductlist32 to pull installed applications instead. my sampleproduct.mof // "AS-IS" sample MOF file for returning the two uninstall registry subkeys // Unsupported, provided purely as a sample // Requires compilation. Example: mofcomp.exe sampleproductslist.mof // Implements sample classes: "SampleProductList" and "SampleProductlist32" // (for 64-bit systems with 32-bit software) #PRAGMA AUTORECOVER [dynamic, provider("RegProv"), ProviderClsid("{fe9af5c0-d3b6-11ce-a5b6-00aa00680c3f}"),ClassContext("local|HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Uninstall")] class SampleProductsList { [key] string KeyName; [read, propertycontext("DisplayName")] string DisplayName; [read, propertycontext("DisplayVersion")] string DisplayVersion; [read, propertycontext("InstallDate")] string InstallDate; [read, propertycontext("UninstallString")] string UninstallString; }; [dynamic, provider("RegProv"), ProviderClsid("{fe9af5c0-d3b6-11ce-a5b6-00aa00680c3f}"),ClassContext("local|HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Wow6432node\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Uninstall")] class SampleProductsList32 { [key] string KeyName; [read, propertycontext("DisplayName")] string DisplayName; [read, propertycontext("DisplayVersion")] string DisplayVersion; [read, propertycontext("InstallDate")] string InstallDate; [read, propertycontext("UninstallString")] string UninstallString; }; .mofs have to be compiled client side also, so i ended up using group policy to deploy a scheduled task to mofcomp my file.

There's a couple of approaches. I have started doing something similar at our school district to try and gather system information, at this stage im more interested in gathering machine specs, serial numbers, memory and hard disk space. I also wanted to try and learn powershell. It uses WMI to connect to remote machines and pull various configuration data, and saves out to CSV files. You could use c# (visual studio express) / sqlexpress. I'm know the same WMI framework can be accessed from that, and there both free. I think the powershell scripting is more hackable, c# may take longer but you'll end up with a developed app. Another option, also something I use here is "the dude" also free which is a network monitoring program which can monitor cpu/memory usage (not sure about cpu temp), interconnection speeds of switches.

I started looking at fog yesterday, and looks very good and a possible solution for our imaging needs replacing wds. Being able to assign an image and re-image will be great. Obviously there is some leg work getting all the required images and name/macs/groupings for all the existing machines. Thanks to everyone that mentioned it above, that gave me the push to check into it. Fingers crossed that multicast will work also.

if you have it setup in standalone environment I run into a few gotchas, initally I think dhcp / drbl is setup with 12 addresses, you have to edit the /etc/dhcpd.conf to get more dhcp addresses and reconfigure the server drblimp or something like that for impatient configuration, possibly I changed something else too.

I did check the multicast switch setting (Extreme x250e-48t), but multicast was working, it would start but always fail client side 5-10 minutes in, was deploying to all identical laptops. I also tried a 3com spare switch we had with same results. I did do 1 successful 2 machine multicast deployment in my testing but as soon as I tried 4+ failed, even going back to 2 machines failed, so must have been a 1 off fluke. Took alot longer to image 100 laptops, with another 50 delivered today would be nice to image 25 at a go, instead of 5. Hopefully I'll get back to it and chase down the issue. Something I was hoping to save time cost me time.

Clonezilla server (DRBL Project) Clonezilla - Sever Edition I have tried both WDS and Clonezilla server to try and setup multicast deployment, I was unsuccessful with both and not sure why. however we did manage to use clonezilla server to unicast deployment successfully. I used these steps to setup and clone the image, deployment was slightly different being only unicast (there's an option on the menu) Imaging School Computers for Free with Clonezilla Server Once you have your images captured just a case of selecting the right image you want to deploy on server and PXE booting the client. Best bit was it was free, apart from my time to figure it all out. **** NOTE **** This is not for the faint hearted, it works pretty well when setup (apart from my lack of getting multicast working) I was able to unicast image 5 machines at once over 100mb (server on 1000mb) link. It did however take me a couple of days to get everything setup and working and requires being comfortable with linux (or at least have very good troubleshooting skills). We also setup a self contained build network to stop any issues with dhcp / PXE (a seperate switch on the desk) and also to keep the build image traffic off our main network, as we were aiming for 20-40 machine deployments. We had about a 35gb image and took around 50 mins to deploy

upgrade from what to what tho? as far as I understand windows 10 functionality you buy the extra features you need (i.e doing away with home, pro, server versions) and cost you money for a license for features like hyper-v as an example. if your upgrading win 7 ultimate or 8 pro (to be honest why would they have pirated anything less) to win 10 they might be hoping to make money from people buying features as I'm sure that they will only give the most basic win10 features to non-genuine.

Also Brit in a small town Texas, USA. I also worked for an Irish company for 12 years and never heard of pinching until today.

simplifying our vlans along with re-addressing, firstly our original vlans weren't configured correctly so we had alot of routing issues where devices couldn't see other devices and hops between wifi and wired weren't routing correctly. We scraped the whole lot and started again (as well as re-addressing all of our devices) and cut down our vlans to 7, 1 for each campus building, the main place we had more vlans was our high school campus. Re-addressing we changed our mask 255.255.248.0 to 255.255.240.0 to allow for more clients per segment. This helped us alot with device allocation and rules for ip allocation. This may not be the most ideal segmentation but its better than we had and eliminated our routing issues. Mainly having the switches configured correctly our switches that had the most connection vlan issues are hp z5412 / 5406 with 10g interconnects. This is the newest of our switches, most of our network is extreme 10/100 with 1000 interconnections. We have no traffic throttling, most of our wifi arrays are connected with gigabit but not sure they really need it after looking at array throughput and your 5mb/s seems like a good cut off to stop massive peaks. I would definitely look at your vlan configurations/trunking and double/triple check them. Some more food for thought is looking at the switches themselves and seeing how hard there working (cpu). 1 of my side projects is to try and cut down on unneeded network protocols ipv6 and legacy protocols, to try and cut any unneeded chatter off the network. Were unlikely to implement ipv6 for quite a while so no need for it on network at this time. I only found out about this a little while ago while reading some other stuff and not likely to make a huge difference, but worth checking, tools like wireshark will help identify.

hey, sounds like a bit of a nite mare there, we have slightly smaller setup 1500 students 250 staff across 3 main campus + 5 other buildings admin, spec ed, old high school, field house and bus barn. It sounds alot like you have interference on your wifi channels with that many aps, my first thing would be to find out ap locations, number of radios, power and what channels those radios are on. We have no-where near your level only 36 xirrus arrays (222 radios, most are 4 or 8). We have very little performance issues apart from overcrowding 60-70 devices on an array. Our wifi was build for distribution and were migrating toward density. -Are they dual band (2.4 & 5)? or only 5 (n,ac) only, can you change config of radios to help support where needed. if there on 2.4 make sure your only using channels 1,6 & 11 -Are you sure there all interconnects are connected at 100? I had a sneaky video conference machine that had BAD performance, later found out plugged into a 10 only hub. -Are you doing any network monitoring? I use "the dude" here as its free and does most of what we need monitor switches, machines, ip cameras going down and interlink traffic volume, most snmp and wmi. - Get some idea of what types of connections/types or devices, few other things to look at would be channel bonding and guard interval (you want short if all your devices support it), and no of radios to use. If you have an overcrowding situation these might help give a bit more performance. - backbone upgrade, sounds like you need it, have you looked at e-rate (title II)? We have applied this year for a BIG network upgrade and they have a big pool of money on an 80/20, so you only pay 20% of the upgrade cost. Possibly its only a Texas thing. I recently went to a very good session at TCEA this year and they explained how wifi magic happens (or not in some cases). They used a great cheap tool to monitor rf in the air called wi-spy by metageek, I think i've managed to convince the school to get one, it monitors air time which is the only real thing that governs wifi is how much air time is in use. No spare air time = no wifi, and wifi only supports 1 client at a time for each radio. some other tips they gave is to turn down the radio power levels, i'll have a dig through my notes and see if i can find other stuff. We also had a load of extra vlans here, and no network structure. Last year we simplfied vlans and re-addressed everything, it has help alot, seems much faster and none of the weird connection problems we had before. I know there's not an answer in that info, but hopefully this will help get you in the right direction. If you want any specifics drop me a message and i'll give you my email/number.

i've used a few resources for learning to program some are not directly related to java. i start with Lightbot Anybody can learn | Code.org Scratch - Imagine, Program, Share CodeCombat - Learn how to code by playing a game then moving onto java. Greenfoot BlueJ - there is also a textbook for bluej / java that we are working through I learnt java from the java tutorials many moons ago and found them great, but had good coding knowledge when i started, I think understanding coding fundamentals and concepts is the first hurdle to get the kids over, trying to entry level into java is quite hard without the fundamentals. by fundamentals i mean instructions, loops, conditional if / else, variables

i use clonezilla for images also, I did try and setup WDS todo multicast deployments but failed to get it setup correctly. This would be my prefered solution for > 20+ machines which require the same image as reduces network load. Never used FOG but have used linux a fair bit, permissions will most likely be controlled by samba and linux permissions, files have a user & group and permissions are user then group then everyone you should be able to see permissions using ls -la and it'll show something like -rwxrwx--- 1 digit for special/directory 3 for user 3 for group and 3 for everyone. To change permissions use chmod command, chown and chgrp to change owner and groups. user might also not translate directly form samba user to linux user, and you may have to setup samba user, been a while but think its something like smbpassd -a and you also might need to poke about in /etc/samba/smbd.conf to check the shares and share permissions / flags.

rarely, have a few programs pinned to start that aren't on my toolbar as don't use them everyday. Don't use any apps or widgets (maybe weather), i also hate being constrained to fullscreen and surely the whole point of "windows" is to have apps in erm windows. going to look and start 8 now.

gpresult /r gpresult /r /scope computer from the client (second one needs elevated command prompt), will show the GPOs being applied. We have experienced that some GPOs haven't been refreshed/applied correctly. Either that replication hasn't accrued to backup DCs or the client hasn't refreshed correctly. you can try a gpupdate /force to force an update but normally needs a reboot, so I normally just reboot and that refreshes.

Hey, I'm not all that familiar which iscsi setup. I did recently re-setup our dlink nas as some muppet have only provisioned 2tb from a 25tb array. I think the LUN and/or name is just the volume identifiers on the NAS, which is what your'll use on iscsi Initiator (pursuming your on windows) to identify which volume your connecting to, we didn't use CHAP as NAS is only connected to one machine (a total waste i know), if its available from your internal LAN you might want to think about access rights. CRC again that will depend on what kinda data is on there and how important its integrity is. Hope this has helped, iscsi configuration seems to be one of those things you do every 5+ years and needs words of encouragement before making potential bad configuration decisions you have to live with for the next 5+ years.

Just upgraded to a cobra and got cargo upto 40t, i started out by trading, then a bit of mining on beta/gamma now i'm bounty hunting. I find trading is hard with limited cargo space, you can get 10t on sidewinder if you run without shields and scanner and max out cargo space. I'm defo a bit aimless tho, just trying to build cr and ship atm. Corba feels like a slug compared to the viper. I made my way to SOL (in a eagle), as i had to check out our system. But can't decide where to go next, been thinking of trying to goto the conflicting system luluwala (or something like that) and see whats going on.

I got paid today *gulp*, steam sale please be kind to me, I already have lots of titles (108 now) I have no time to play.

10gbe backbone, Network restructure (move to core switches instead of 48 port switches chained (at least they did get backplane cables for them)), ditch at&t leased fibre to our elementary, community wifi, upgrade internal wifi from converage to density and try and convince that most teacher workstations and servers need replacing. So nothing major here.

iBoss is what our region center uses (esc18), and our service is provided by them so we inherit it. I don't have any dealings with it directly but it seems todo an ok job. We have found that a few of the smarter kids have got through the filter with vpns hotspot shield/ tunnel bear, even though there suppose to be blocked. I told the boss but nothing has happened yet.

Driving has become much duller moving from UK to USA. I used to skip gears quite a lot, 4th - 2nd when heavy braking for tight corners, and 1-3 / 2-4 / 3-5 when pootling around. Going from UK to USA, manual to auto and sport car to SUV is a huge change, here we drive mile after mile on straight road, hour drive to main local shops. 3 hour drive to parent in laws house, 10 hours to Austin. Driving standards here are also much much lower, and lots of big work trucks and 18 wheelers. Always hearing crashes (in the local area) on TV pretty much daily, most fatal.

I let the wife take care of xmas shopping as she enjoys it and i'm the grinch. I really hate getting cheap tat for xmas, I know someone spent time and effort getting it, but i'd rather they'd not and saved the money. Me and the wife have a thing that i pick out and buy my xmas pressie and she picks out and buys her's. We get excately what we want and there's no disappointment in what we got (it also tends to be a bigger purchase), also as were buying the gifts (for ourselves) we don't have to wait till xmas. So I got mine on Saturday a nice shiney lenovo thinkpad yoga 14. Only to not really be able to play on sunday due to lack of internet, doh!

I had some problems with dhcp trying to use PXE network boot in different campus, I found dhcp relay (sometimes called dhcp helper) on our extreme switches.