jamesb

Very important - check that you're only downloading updates for the appropriate language. 40GB isn't that out of the ordinary, but you may want to strip out any products you don't use/need.

Sooo...you're suggesting we're not geeks because we don't read the manual? With you on the instant delivery though - I've taken my card details off Amazon and started just buying an amount in gift vouchers each month, saves me from losing everything to books.

Not to mention the crawling, creeping horror, fear to ever go diving, and phobia of non-Euclidian geometry which it causes.

Neal Asher's Polity series are probably one of the best Space Opera sets of recent time. Max Frei's The Stranger and The Ship of Woes (I think) are very good semi-surrealistic adult-Harry Potter-esqeish fantasy/weirdness stuff. Infernal Devices is good if you like Steampunk at all, along with George Mann's works. Rule 32 and Halting State by Charles Stross are good modern-science fiction-cyberpunk fare, with a lot of interesting ideas. The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss make for some very good fantasy stuff - though frustrating as he seems to take a long time between books. The Lies of Locke Lamora is more fantasy fare, also quite good. The Diamond Age is one of my favourites, by Neal Stephenson and up there with Dune in my estimation. Also Snow Crash by the same. More fantasy stuff - Blood of Elves and The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski (where the Witcher games came from). Hopefully that'll be enough to be getting on with.

There's a few good free ones, the Sherlock Holmes collection, HP Lovecraft, Jules Verne. I'd suggest others but it depends what type of books you normally read and enjoy?

Never mind - found it after a short lunchtime nap. I forgot that VBScript uses elseif rather than else if.

dsquery * domainroot -filter "(&(objectCategory=user)(whenCreated>=YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.0Z))" So whenCreated>=20110611000000.0Z would get you everyone created since midnight on the 11th of June. Just output to a text file if you need to save it.

It's to do with the advertising of domain services in DNS I believe - since the controller's demoting itself, it doesn't trust itself to provide it's own domain services. Just pointing DNS to another DC should have fixed it. I could be wrong though.

I've got the attached script, which works quite happily when I split it into segments. The problem comes when it's all together. Every time it runs, I get an Expected End error. I can't, for the life of me, see why or where it should go. Dim oAPIDim oBag Dim oShell Dim oFSO Dim oFolder Dim oFiles Dim iFileSize Dim iFileCount Dim sBackupFolder Dim fLatestBackup Dim dFileModDate Set oAPI = CreateObject("MOM.ScriptAPI") Set oBag = oAPI.CreatePropertyBag() Set oShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell") sBackupFolder = oShell.Environment.item("BackupPath") Set oFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") if sBackupFolder <> "" then Set oFolder = oFSO.GetFolder(sBackupFolder) Set oFiles = oFolder.Files iFileSize = 0 iFileCount = 0 for each oFile in oFiles iFileCount = iFileCount + 1 iFileSize = iFileSize + oFile.Size if DateDiff("h", oFile.DateLastModified, Now) < 24 then sLatestBackup = oFile end if next if fLatestBackup <> "" then if fLatestBackup.Size => (iFileSize / iFileCount * 0.9) then Call oBag.AddValue("Status", "Valid") else if fLatestBackup.Size < (iFileSize / iFileCount * 0.9) then Call oBag.AddValue("Status", "Undersized") end if else Call oBag.AddValue("Status", "Missing") end if else Call oBag.AddValue("Status", "NoPath") end if Call oAPI.Return(oBag) Anyone got any ideas? I suspect I'm just tired and have missed something incredibly obvious.

CTC or SC? If it's CTC you'll be glad to hear that after a couple of months downtime the new processing system's up.

There are a few other things which could be argued to make corporate more demanding. Project management requirements, adhering to ISO standards, change control requirements, longer lines of reporting, cross-charging (usually to make it clear that IT is actually a profit centre and not a cost centre), multi-site administration, security clearance requirements, politics (more staff than a school in general - though no students) and so on. Of course, nothing prevents these things from being aspects of working in a school, but in my own experience it tends to be less common and less strict.

Don't mention the security clearance forms - I'm currently trying to summon up the determination to tackle my CTC clearance forms - 30 pages. Lovely.

Ah, HMGCC might be a different matter. Have you dealt with change control in any great detail? If so, point this out to them as they're probably after procedural awareness rather than a particular skillset.

That depends on the company - in large enterprises you'll have roles assigned to different people, but each of those roles will be much larger than in a school or SMB. For example, an Exchange administrator will likely be in charge of a dozen or more Exchange servers, spread across multiple sites, with some crossover to AD administration and SQL. In an SMB you'll usually find that infrastructure as a whole is assigned to a smaller team who are responsible across the board. My own team covers all internal infrastructure (Windows and Linux) and all client infrastructure which we host or provide support for.

In my own experience (three schools, three companies) the demands are different. At schools the demands are from users who want to be able to do something new and shiny. At the companies I've worked in the demands are generally from either clients, or business units, who see opportunities to make or save money. It does mean that in the private sector if a system goes down you are actively losing money. I work for an SMB, and we've calculated that an hour of downtime costs us just shy of £3000 if it's a business critical system, with some of the external client's systems that goes up by a factor of ten (financial penalties). Budgetting-wise I think you'd be surprised at how little infrastructure can get. Generally IT is seen as a cost centre in a company, rather than as an integral part of making money. In a school there is no profit to be made, so it's just about apportioning the cost out. In a company every pound spent on IT is a pound more profit that has to be made in order to break even. Every purchase has to be carefully justified, with cost/benefit analysis. You're also more likely to work with the latest technology in a school than a private company, because the company will be much, much more risk-averse. If the school network goes down you've just not got a network for a little while - if a company network goes down you are losing money (not just profits - if people can't work without the network, which many can't in a corporate environment, then their salary is essentially going down the drain). Every private company I've worked for has had a couple of beige boxes lying around like a dirty secret, running legacy software that's too much risk to upgrade and holding back everything else on the network. I don't think there's actually a huge difference in the demands, other than the private sector being business-led rather than user-led (if you're lucky). Personally I couldn't be persuaded to go back into the education sector, regardless of the potential rewards.

Kill the bad DC, wipe it, rebuild it, do a metadata cleanup to remove all references to it from AD then put it back on the domain and dcpromo it again. It's only a DC, and any attempt to recover bits and pieces of it risk damaging AD.

A USB key's always an option.

Absolutely - after a frustrating creeper encounter in minecraft the first thing I tend to do is dive into a simple blood 'n' guts game to unwind.

Out of curiousity - where's the advantage in this, since if you get a hardware failure you're going to lose all three DCs anyway? I'm just curious if there's a specific reason you have it set up this way? I just want to confirm that I didn't misread this. The website had to run on a DC?

I think gloves and glasses will replace tablets by then, but always-on high-bandwidth connectivity and cloud storage seems likely.

Informational singularity, each of us with our own private noospheres, able to interlink and communicate with other's at will. Augmented reality will be commonplace through GAG displays (gloves and goggles) meaning that we can all walk around in our own customised bubble-reality (to a point). Whole new concepts of crime and communications, and quite possible with a generation on the way who will be as alien to us in their way of interacting with technology/extelligence as we are to the previous generation who struggle with google. Add to that expert systems bordering on emergent property complexity, and that's where I think/hope it goes.

Anyone know roughly how much one of these would cost? I've been told that we need to go for the the SAS rather than the SATABoy (my boss has a liking for 15k disks) and I've only managed to get prices for the SATABoy so far. Thanks, James

Bah! You should be in second place below me.

Must be out of date.

Except that today they added the Exchange 365 Online track. Apparently I'm now number 1 in the country. I suppose I have to be good at something.