mikeyd101

Yep have your domain name ready and DNS forward information (or use google 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4). Possibly other roles to consider are DHCP (if you don't have one already). I've not got as far as looking at 2012 so don't know how much has changed, previous server windows you goto run or cmd line and type: DCPROMO This kicks off the domain wizard, it will also check that all the required roles and services are available and walks you through domain creation, take it slow and google anything your unsure on. I believe there's a few gotcha's for domain naming. I think its strongly advised you DON'T use .local My advice is if your starting out and playing around is to find a machine with a decent amount of ram in and setup a few virtual machines something like hyper-v (windows 8) or virtualbox and start creating virtual servers/clients and play around, this will allow you to quickly create multiple machines, create test machines and break everything down again quickly, also if you make a mistake scratch it all and start again. Microsoft also have some great tech labs (multiple machine enviroments) designed to teach specific environments / roles. TechNet Virtual Labs Best of luck

F1 2013 a few times before switching it off never to play again each time. Physics feel very canned/synthetic. Not played new Grid but not really on my radar after playing earlier attempts again the physics felt horrid on the other grids I played. Saying you can't play it on 360 controller might have been an over statement. I found/find it frustrating on xbox controller, especially after using a wheel. It is intended to be used with a wheel and plays 100 times better with the appropriate controller. If you are into driving games I highly recommend that you try and pick up a wheel, G27 or Driving Force GT but I wouldn't go much cheaper. My wife gave into my hobby and brought me a Obutto R3volution for my b'day this year, again its the next rung on the ladder for getting fully immersed.

Ok a little background on me, I have been a huge Sim Racing fan since I discovered REVS on the BBC B when I was at school, I've gone through various sims/games up till now Geoff Crammonds GP2, Grand Prix Legends, GTR, GTL, rFactor, LFS, netKar, netKar Pro, iRacing, rFactor2, pCars, forza 1-3 and grand turismos 1-4 and loads more not worth mentioning. Down to AC (Assetto Corsa), First off you need some kind of wheel, I use a G25 which i've had for a number of years and still going strong, I've tried playing AC on xbox 360 pad and it doesn't cut it, you just can't get the feeling and fine control you need. My personal opinion is that AC has very good feel for what the car is actually doing (where the rubber meets the road), the ability to control the car at lower speeds than the edge of traction are easy and controlled and the physics engine is up in the current top 3 and in my opinion currently better than rF2 and iRacing, in AC I don't get those ehh what happened there moments which frequent the lesser sims, I crash in AC because I was going too fast or lost control (I'm not schumacer, even sharing a first name doesnt seem to help ) Downsides, its still in active development, meaning there are still issues the biggest atm is probably the online lobby booking system, which feels very last generation. Sounds aren't the best but ok, limited content - this is starting to grow now community have a few tools, so we are seeing lots of converted tracks from other games which aren't up to the same standards yet. Message me if you want more details.

Games that I got during this years summer sale, think I managed to get most at the lowest sale price and got a few games for missus to play: Reus Dragon Age: Origins - Ultimate Edition The Swapper Bioshock Tripple Pack The Witcher: Enhanced Edition Don't Stave SpaceChem The Witcher 2 Braid Super Meat Boy Brothers Bastion Biggest surprise out of those was Braid, which I think i've played the most (of my newest additions), still trying to figure out Reus and few not really played yet. I also struggle to tear myself away from Assetto Corsa which I've been into since early access release, and now there is an onslaught of community modded tracks appearing.

Here are a few that I use, I'm still trying to figuring out our network infrastructure. The switches themselves can have good information (are they managed switches?) in the arp and lldp tables which might get you some mac address and port information if your lucky. You might also need to enable lldp or find the vendor specific discovery/neighbour. Nmap Software is good for scanning ip ranges and getting ip <-> mac relationships. The Dude is good monitoring and discovery (tho I found it easier to just add devices I wanted to monitor manually) And like you said disconnecting things and seeing what goes down.

I have it setup so we have a post OS deployment sequence task, it gives you check boxes of the apps you want to install, click which you want and off it goes. It seems to work ok if you run it by itself, if you try and install OS deployment and post OS deployments together it always seems to fail and I haven't had time to look into it, but no hassle just to re-run the litetouch script again

Were applied for a grant, if we get it we are getting a large quantity of learnpads and community wifi, so they can use them at school and home.

Group Policies? I noticed our login times are extending as we add more GPOs, nothing that hammers our DCs tho. I'd break out prefmon as well as wireshark and find out what is consuming the resources. Also event log is worth trawling during those times.

our images are between 25-35gb depending on machine and campus.

+1 for MDT, that's what I use here tho if i have a number of machines todo i also use clonezilla and just clone the disks from one machine to the next. You have to be a bit careful about the number of single deployments you do concurrently from MDT, I found with our setup here the machine can only manage about 4-6 machines before taking a huge performance penalty (network or disk its a very old machine using as a server). Main process is build your image (starting with the install media / iso), add oobe drivers to MDT (normally only need network, mass storage drivers to get you up and running) install software, do updates, unjoin domain, capture image, create a task schedule from captured image, build Win PE cd/usb and boot machine and deploy image. There are plenty of youtube videos around which explain in more detail. I've tried looking at WDS and Multicast but couldn't get it working. On saying all that MDT/WDS is a lot of work to get you to the point of deploying images. I normally just build first machine and then just clone the hdd for the next computer. Somehow I find it quicker to deploy. If your short on time cloning might be the easiest option (no big learning overhead), you don't really need to learn much build your master machine and copy it, then when you have a copy you have 2 masters and can make 2 copies at a time. A clone for me normally takes about 10 minutes to clone then another 5-10 mins to unjoin / rejoin domain (unjoin the domain on master saves some time), and re-activate windows and office. I normally do if backward too rather than remove disk from each machine i move my master disk with image on and clone to the machine. How many machines have you got to image?

In my experience no, just 1 extra thing you have to deal with. We had huge issues with incorrect vlan configurations at our High School Campus, so we were a bit burnt by vlans and may effect recommendation. We have simplified to 1 vlan per campus site and our wifi merged with no guest access. Possibly with the exception of wireless, if you want more control on that then it may be worth a vlan.

I'd start with telnet / shh session to the switch then: show arp that will give ip,mac and port and show lldp info remote-device This info is probably available through the web inferface also, i just prefer command line and possibly you might need to look at show lldp config if it doesn't work to enable it, looks like this show the neighbouring switches ChassisId, local and remote ports, that's what our E5406zl shows, also i think (not sure) that lldp will need to be enabled on the surrounding switches in order to talk lldp to each other. I'm still trying to learn and figure this all out for myself so take the info with a large pinch of salt, it could be wrong. But it's help me slowly try and figure out our complex network spaghetti junction my predecessors left.

make sure its secure just read this: Crooks use Synology NAS boxen to mine Dogecoin, yells Dell

Thanks for all the input guys, its help alot. I'm sure which ever is picked HP or Extreme we will be ok with, I'm hoping HP then we only have one manufacture for all our equipment and may also bring added value to us as if we have a certain annual spend we may qualify for on-site warranty work.

Our network equipment is getting to the point that our failure rate is increasing. Most of our equipment ranges from oldest Unicom and Dlink to Extreme to HPs being our newest equipment. Most of our issues is with the extreme equipment (mostly x250e-48t) either solo switches or in stacks. Our split is probably 75% extreme, 20% HP and 5% other We have applied for a grant which could cover 80% cost of upgrading our infrastructure. We have a network consultant who is working with us to help remedy some of our network issues and the proposals for the future. I'm in no way the decision maker but am fairly knowledgeable Tech (more so than our coordinator). Consultant is pushing big for Extreme equipment, saying he has good working relationship with them. So i'd like to get some opinions on what manufacture is preferred to go with for switches? What equipment you have/would consider and likes/dislikes/issues? My gut feeling is that we should strongly look at HPs (95% of our pcs/servers are HPs)

I agree more central processing and streaming like steam streaming and nvidia shield. Probably apps for next gen tablets to stream/gaming to also being able to stream directly to smart tvs, I'm sure were have to put up with multi different network stream standards (aka VHS / Betamax all over again). hopefully things like oculus rift / vr glasses will be combined with the new streaming technology, not sure it will happen for a few console generations tho. I think we'll also see a emergence of newer 3d tech like real time raytracing, voxel and the move towards photorealistic 3d environments. I also think were see more squeeze from the communication companies on the content providers, which is starting to bubble big time in USA.

What switches do you have managed / un-managed? I've recently been exploring this in our environment and discovered a couple of things that may help LLDP (link Layer discovery protocol) which on our extremes wasn't enabled by default but is industry standard. Also ARP tables should show you mac/ip and if your lucky port information. If you happen to have extreme you can do: show iparp which shows ip, mac and port (but can display multiple devices on same port if there's another switch) also show edp ports all shows what other extreme switches are plugged into what port.

cat5 crimp tool (if your doing patch cables too), punch down tool (test patch cables), tester (We have a Fluke IntelliTone Pro Toner and probe, not cheap and not the best but helps loads trying to trace the right cable also doubles as cable tester) and either something like metal tape (fish tape) or fibreglass rods (depending how much cable fishing you have todo). Then you have your boxes / face plates / trunking and various other tools decent enough drill and bits, screwdriver, sharpie, gloves and glasses etc. I'm trying to convince my boss to get fiber installation stuff but there's a pretty steep entry price for test equipment.

Hey I use the dude for monitoring our server and switch infrastructure, while I haven't got down to the level of what user is logged into what machine the thing i did find was that you can get alot of information from snmp, which you have to enable on the machines first. I also played around with powershell last year and managed to get alot more detailed information from WMI and LDAP. I was going to use this to generate inventory database. If your in a domain id also look at user AD security auditing as that allows you to audit user logons, I was thinking about user login but was going to use a login /logoff scripts.

There are some intro tutorials to run through on scratch, and the ability to "look inside" any project that is submitted in the community is great, something that I tell my kids is the way you learn how to program is by reading and understanding other peoples code. There is also another resource for scratch for educators (something I only found recently) ScratchEd I haven't had much time to go through it but looks like it could be a great resource to find some lessons that will fit whatever your trying to achieve. I also started with code.org because that has structured lesson advancement (15-20 hours) and introduces them to the fundamentals. loops, variables and functions. which you need before you can then build on that. I am also lucky that I come from a software development background (20+ years) so understand what they need to learn very well, something that is hard if you don't understand computational thinking and are trying to learn it at the same time as students.

I run a tech club wed and fri lunchtimes. I started with coding and computational thinking I found a couple of good resources as an intro to it playing games / solving puzzles. Anybody can learn | Code.org - this also has a teacher sign up were you can have a teacher account and track kids progress CodeMonkey - similar to code.org but has them actually writing some code Scratch - Imagine, Program, Share - a few kids have just started this and have them writing a simple rock/paper/scissor game a few others im hoping to move onto are: Greenfoot - java IDE / Library for writing games aimed at kids with a community for sharing. BlueJ W3Schools Online Web Tutorials some others that I also want to look at: Learn to code | Codecademy and CodingBat Java I also plan to look into other tech areas 3D Drawing (sketchup) in preparation for making a stronger case to get a 3D printer and some music production using DAWs.

or Fibre Adapter Panel (FAPs) we had one the other day.

I've been running a tech club for a few months now. I've been using code.org as an introduction, then moving to scratch to allow them to be more creative. I plan todo a bit of web technologies html/css/javascript (w3schools) and then probably move on to greenfoot or bluej. Im also considering a step of something like codeacademy, as the jump from GUI programing to writing code may be too difficult. I'll also be looking into Alice.

Im just testing this with a GPO and first go I ran into the security problem (set high), I went the modified .MSI route (using orca and changing value [WEB_JAVA_SECURITY_LEVEL] to M) seemed to work and didn't require any extra steps or scripts. I also only found out today that you can update/upgrade with GPO Software Installs, so means updates can be in same GPO rather than creating new one each time, worked a treat for flash and in testing with java atm.

We have been using clonezilla here for XP -> 7 migration. I found quickest way is to open the machines up and rip the hdd and clone from a master machine. We only have about 40Gb on the drive windows, office and a few other apps. So by the time finished messing around with the fresh cloned drive (windows/office activation, rename and re-join domain) the next one is ready. I just done a suite of 20 machines which took me well over a day (I could have probably gone faster with multiple machines cloning, but I was working around classes). Its probably quicker to clone disk to disk than usb to disk.