Cache

I appreciate the helpfulness of Smoothwall support, however while the initial contact time has definitiely improved, getting a followup to an issue still doesn't seem to have gotten any quicker. The recent issue following our migration which seemed to screw everything up and require a reinstall (as suggested on here) was sat open on the ticket system for 2 weeks without a response despite me chasing it up which I was disappointed with. I hope the price hasn't increased dramatically otherwise we will also have to start looking elsewhere as good as it is because the budget won't be able to take it .

To be fair, Adobe are moving across to an EES type scheme (called EEA) however it certainly isn't cheap and personally I think they've missjudged the pricing, we won't be moving across to it and can't afford a Site licence so will have to remain without (unless you have a large number of staff, it's cheaper to buy the 250/500 site licence). I've been given all my details from Academia so far.

Sounds a lot like RM, I remember another thread on here about it... Edit: try these http://www.edugeek.net/forums/behind-red-door/102163-insert-swear-word-here-ing-rm.html http://www.edugeek.net/forums/network-classroom-management/77222-software-migration-cc3-another-provider.html

We still have 4 machines using Office 2003 and SIMS quite heavily and not had any issues crop up yet, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Anyway, I thought Spring was the last release to support Office 2003, so in theory the Summer release will be where you should start to worry?

We virtualised it in the summer and it's been no problem at all.

No problem, bet you can guess how many time my deploying Solus 3 agent updates goes to plan.

We had this, it's the version mismatch between 3.5.20 and 3.4.118 with 3.5.20 implementing the version check which does the upgrade. I had about half a dozen which the Deployment Server ignored when they came online and just pushing the update out again worked. The Solus3 agent doesn't have a redeploy update button so all we did was from the Manage Updates screen was run the 3.5.20 deployment again. It will skip doing the database, gui etc and any already successfully upgraded agents and just attempt to do the ones it failed to do last time or any new ones which have been added since the update was run.

The point they were making to me was if someone came from France/Germany/Spain they would get a hugely cheaper rate in Scotland compared to someone from England. I realise if your from Scotland and go to a Scotish university you get it free, I didn't realise that from England you pay a lot more the France/Germany/Spain/anywhere else in the EU. (being close to the border you here a lot more about all these things)

We have the Olympus VN-8500 and our MFL department love them, so easy to use, record away plug in and copy the files off. Definitely the best thing we've bought and very very cheap too!

Is the OU based in Scotland then? Somebody was telling me the other day that English students going to Uni in Scotland paid 3 times the ammount that anyone else in the EU did.

As above really, make sure you've got the passwords you need, and then for the 1st couple of months I went and got to know the system, gradually adapting and changing things and then waiting to see if anyone complains. I probably took to much of a softly softly aproach, if I was doing it again I would be slightly more forceful, however having moved to Windows 7 last summer it gave me the opportunity to change a hell of a lot. (3 Years and when I changed some things people complained to much so changed them back. Changed them again in the Windows 7 upgrade and nobody has said a thing other then 1 member of staff who I placated) Check what documentation is there, try and get an understanding of the rest of it and make friends with the important people who can make your life easier. (business manager/bursar, few heads of department and the reception/office staff)

Here's hoping that nothing breaks when I finally do it!

Looked in ADSIedit, One OU folder called Dynamic which is empty, two CN folders called Lost & Found and NTDS Quotas which are empty, and an Infrastructure attribute which has attributes linked to it, but the createTimeStamp, modifyTimeStamp, whenCreated and whenChanged are all March 2005. Guessing we don't use it then.... So from that, I should be safe to remove the partition and then demote the server?

We're not licenced for Lync Server. Looking at the keys, the MAK and one of the KMS keys is linked to an agreement Ramesys messed up a couple of years ago where I somehow ended up linked higher then I should be, the other is a KMS key linked to Office 2013 our EES agreement.

Just searched our VLSC, it's just called Lync 2013.

Afternoon all I'm considering demoting our last 2003 DC. I did attempt it once in the past and recived a message about it being the only server containing the TAPI partition and at that point I quietly canceled the process and went on to something else. Coming back to this now, as far as I'm aware nothing uses TAPI within our system, if there is something here it's been working quietly away for the past couple of years. Should I just remove the partition and carry on or replicate it across to another server so that it's still hanging around? Even better, any easy way I can identify if anything is using it? Thanks

Had an issue with a dead Toshiba laptop HDD and no recovery disc, downloading the Windows Vista with Service Pack 2 ISO from technet and reinstalling worked a treat using the COA, inputting the key after the installation rather then during and didn't have to call to activate.

Simple - It doesn't! We used to have a change request logged for it to be highlighted before it was removed in the great change request purge.

I had a fairly painless deployment compared to the past few that have happened. 2 Workstations failed, one didn't update because the service failed to start (restarting the service fixed that) and 2 teachers got on to quickly before the update had worked, however by the time I got round to the computers (thankfully they'd closed the login screen down) solus had gone and successfully done the update. Suprisingly, even the science machines which normally cause me the most problems because they kill the power each night and one is wireless so normally pretty slow, had managed to complete the update automatically without any intervention from me.

Thanks @dezt, had been told there would be a small increase. Wonder if we'll get April for free then since it's the last day tomorrow with no charges?

Out of Interest, has lancashire recieved the CLEO charges for 2013/14 yet or is it just Cumbria that's left high and dry waiting?

Can't find my old batch file using contig, but it was scheduled to run about once a month I think. The command was something like contig -s -v E:\* where e was the backup2disk drive, -s makes it recurse subdirectories and -v made it verbose. It will take a while to run and might require a few runs through as it will try to reduce fragmentation of files as much as possible depending on the freespace it has to locate files to. You might not see immediate benefits with it either, depending on how far through you are replacing the old B2D files which were 1GB with the 10GB ones, I think it was about a month after as the freespace before the most benefit was recieved.

Give Contig a try to defragment the files and the disk, I've been told it does a much better job at defragmentation then the built in utilities of Windows. I haven't go all the command line switches to hand, think they are on my backup dvd at home so will take a look tonight for you. It can also defragment the freespace which did help matters slightly for us. Contig We're a much smaller site, so arround the 500 user mark. My backup capacity has only increased slightly over the past couple of years, so my full backups are arround the 800GB mark, but I suspect over the last 6 months that's down to Veeam deduplicating a lot of the data because I have added several more servers since virtualising. I know your pain with the quota's though, that's my next project to revisit again. It's odd that 200GB doesn't take any longer to backup then 100GB, 25 hours does seem very slow even for that!

I would say it's probably down to the amount of data and I don't know whether there is a lot you can do about it. You could check and see if it is using software compression rather then hardware/none if you don't need to compress the data for space reasons. Another point, the differential backups you mention will be backing up data that has changed since the last full backup, so: on Friday 1 you do your full backup Monday 1 will be data that changed saturday, sunday & monday Tuesday 1 will be data that changed saturday, sunday, monday & tuesday ... so that when you get to Thursday 4 you are backing up all changes that have occured over the last 3 weeks So it is potentially a large amount of data that is being backed up by the time you get to the 3rd/4th week. We don't have anywhere near the same amount of data as you but we do a full backup on Friday and a Diff Mon - Thurs on the last physical box we've got. Depending on how many of your differential backups are overlapping, this might relieve this issue if you can do a more regular full backup. Another thing to check would be the size of your backup2disk files to see what size it is. It could be the large number of files are fragmenting the system so much (but would be suprised since it's on a SAN). I haven't used backupexec in a B2D environment for a while so it could be my ideas are way off, but still worth a look.

Sent you an email Luke, Microsoft called me this morning spookily enough and they didn't know the answer to the question so god only knows what chance I stood.