ranj

Hi I am interested in hearing from other schools, in particular Birmingham schools to see whether they have seen an increase in SPAM over the last few weeks/months. I have been getting a lot of SPAM over the last few weeks as well as a significant number of staff in our school. BGFL recently sent an email regarding problems with SPAM. A lot of the SPAM would get blocked and be filtered with the PMM filtering system that BGFL introduced a year or two ago but now it seems to be bypassing that and coming straight through our inboxes. In particular lots of banking ones are coming through most trying to be HSBC or Natwest. Have other schools experienced the same problem? I be interested in hearing how other schools tackle problems with SPAM. We are using Exchange 2007 and know we could look into Forefront but am worried about the extra administration this could potentially cause and potentially the more expensive licensing we would have to consider for our schools agreement as we would need to buy the enterprise desktop CALs... At a recent training session I went to another colleague said he recommended mailmarshall (is quite cheap and works very well in blocking lots of SPAM) but said he becomes a daily chore to ensure nothing legitemate email is being blocked. Apparantly can cause more calls to IT because some emails will get blocked. I am going to have to do something about this as it's getting worse. Any advice would be most appreciated. Thanks

Sorry forgot to add, if I can do the above option. Can I just do an inplace upgrade from opensuse to Ubuntu without affecting the Windows partition?

If I have OpenSuse on a primary partition and windows on a another, would i be able to safely delete the suse partition or would this affect windows booting up? I am using the bootloader for suse to boot into the 2 OS's. I am thinking I might try the VHD option but dont want to mess up the whole disk, I suppose I could do an image in case it goes wrong...

Ok got things working again but not made any progress. When I repromoted the 2003 server having just demoted it yesterday, after leaving it for about an hour and chaging the network setting, everything that I mentioned is now working again. SID's dont show up anymore, I can log in via rdp to all the servers again etc etc But I still have this damn 2003 server still in the domain which I want to get rid off :-( I have logged a support call with Microsoft so hopefully they can help and help me understand what happened when I tried to demote this 2003 server. What I dont understand is just by removing AD of this 2003 server the other servers should have continued the role, unless I am missing something and there is some hidden configuration on this legacy 2003 server which I am not aware of. If its DNS which is the general consensus on this thread. Are there any tools which can help me to identify any potential problems? One thing I have to mention is previously when we had 2003 servers, when we wanted to join a XP, vista client to the domain we could just type in the domainname when joining the computer, our domain name is the name of our school but it now seems we have to type in the netbios name that was given to us when the domain was created which is schoolname.pri. When we type in just schoolname and press return we receive the following error message: "The following error occured when DNS was queried for the service location (SRV) resource record used to locate a domain controller for domain queensbridge: The error was "DNS name does not exist" RCODE_NAME_ERROR This must be related I am thinking if the problem is DNS. Any suggestions? I am going home now can't believe I am here this late on a Friday! Thanks for the support given.

Hi yes I confirmed all roles have moved over to the 2008 server. I checked this by running netdom query fsmo and the replies I got back where all roles were and they were on the 2008 server as expected. Before the summer these roles were on the 2003 server though but ALL were successfully transferred.

An update: I decided to restart the windows 2008 R2 server and now have run into bigger problems. I now cannot log back into the server, when the server starts up it briefly has a network connection and then I just received a request timed out message. Its a virtual machine and even if I try to login to it locally it just hangs, if I boot up in safe mode it does allow me to login. What I also did was to repromote the 2003 server in the hope that it will resolve all the problems I was having but that hasn't worked either. I installed AD back onto the machine and whilst that sucessfully actioned, it doesnt seem to be replicating the sysvol data etc from the other servers. If I try to load any of the AD tools I just receive a message which says "naming information cannot be located because: the specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted..." Please Help!

I ran dcdiag on both of the 2008 servers and it passed all tests. I am not able to run netdiag, is that a separate download or part of some resources kit? I did see in sites and services, the old server, I removed this. thanks

Hi Hoping if someone can help me on this major problem I am having. Over the summer we introduced 2008 onto our network, we had an old 2003 server which was the first DC ever created on the network when it was created back in 2004. The plan over the summer was to remove all of our 2003 servers and the whole AD structure to run on 2008 only. After some testing we realised that the primary 2003 DC was going to be a bit more difficult to demote as other services relied on it such as old linux boxes we had on the network. After months of planning and finally deciding to go ahead and do it, I demoted the 2003 server last night so the network was only running on the 2 2008 DC's DNS server we had on the network. just to point out one of these 2008 servers also has all the FSMO roles and both are AD integreated DNS and global catalogs. so in theory windows services should have worked fine and for the most part that worked, users were able to login and see their files. Today though I have noticed some problems which I am hoping someone may have come across. If I dont act these soon I see big problems ahead... I'll list the problems below: One 200R2 member server I am not able to RDP into anymore. It says "remote desktop cannot verify the identity of the remote computer because there is a time or date difference between your computer and the remote computer. Make sure your computers clock is set to the correct time..." As this server is a VM I logged in through the vcenter client and checked the time and it seems to be identitical to my local machine. Both of our file servers which have shares for home documents and shared areas (1 2003 and 1 2008 R2 server) seem to be working but when I look at the permission it seems to show them as SIDS and not with the naming scheme and from what I can see it only shows some users, never shows groups The same 2008 R2 server is also an NPS and active directory certificate server ( this is used for wireless logins using RADIUS). in the event log I am getting all sorts of errors " There is no domain controller available for domain...., on the ad certificate event log I am getting Active Directory Certificate Services could not publish a Delta CRL for key 0 to the following location: ldap:///CN=DOMAINNAME-CLANCY-CA,CN=clancy,CN=CDP,CN=Public Key Services,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=DOMAINNAME,DC=PRI. Operation aborted 0x80004004 (-2147467260). On the 2008 R2 server i am also getting a certificate templates message saying "windows encountered problems emumerating writable domain controllers for the DOMAIN. the format of the specified domain name is invalid. the system cannot log you on due to the following error: the specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted. If anyone could advise if they have come across any of these problems, it would be most appreciated Thanks

Hi One another question I had was how do I go about setting up webmin on this Gentoo machine? If I try to use the apt-get command it says the command cannot be found. It seems though that this machine has been completly stripped down with access to hardly anything. I do have root access to this machine so unsure why I still cannot do it

If we have schools agreement already and have the desktop standard package which includes client, windows, office and exchange cal. Am i right in saying it includes a system center cal also? Does it mean i just got to buy a server license?

Hi I was wondering if someone may be able to advise me on a recent email I received regarding the school Adobe CS3 site license. I received an email from Adobe which said "It is time to renew your Adobe CLP membership Action Required" Your current number of CLP points qualifies you to automatically renew into Discount Level S I was under the impression that once you paid for adobe license once, unless you wanted to upgrade to the newer version, you wouldn't need to pay any more. Is this the case or do I have my wires crossed. It mentions in the email "Your CLP membership can be renewed http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/openoptions/enroll_commercial.html Online . In order to ensure uninterrupted CLP membership, you will need to submit your renewal at least 10 days prior the expiration date. Please note that without this renewal, Adobe will no longer be able to offer you the benefits of the CLP program." Does this mean that we wont get some additional benefits because we dont renew? If someone could clarify this for me it would be most appreciated. It be good to hear from schools who have a Adobe CS3 site license. I remember purchasing the software from Ramesys, at the time they were offering good deals. Thanks

check out HotUKDeals - Deals - All for bargains out there on the net and in UK shops.

Is this the ride where you have to sign an agreement before you go on... If so I am up for that.

Hi i have just tried to install a in car Mp3/CD player in my car. The installation has seemed to have gone ok, it works when I turn it on and can listen to music through the speakers and even my in car phone kit is all working :-) The only problem I am having is when I setup my preset stations and clock settings when the ignition is turned off it loses all the settings. I have checked the back of the cd player and ensured that all of the connections are correct. Is the problem with the back of the headunit, or could it be something under the bonnet such as the battery not being connected to the radio? Whats odd is if I leave it for a few moments it keeps the settings but if its off for hours thats when it loses the settings. The car is a 06 Ford Focus so any advice would be of great help. Many thanks

Thought I would share this with fellow Mac admins running 10.5 server. Had an issue with our Mac server recently where it froze so the only way of rebooting the server was forcefully shutting it down via the power button. This in return caused even bigger issues at bootup. None of our users could login to any of the 45 iMacs we have in school using their open directory account. After lots of researching on the web and talks with Apple professionals at the support line, I was able to fix the corrupt DB. Apparantly it likely happened when the server had a force shutdown. if you run open directory to manage your logins for Mac users and in server admin if the LDAP server and password server is not running you need to do the following to first to check the db. Checking the DB in terminal sudo /usr/libexec/slapd -Tt if it says database cannot be opened or something along these lines, then try sudo db_recover -h /var/db/openldap/openldap-data/ - this will try to recover the db. We found even after this it still didnt work, if we tried to use workgroup manager it would come up with an error "The workgroup manager would popup a window saying "Error of type eDSRecord Not Found (-14136) on line 1189 of /SourceCache/WorkgroupManager/WorkgroupManager-319.1.1/PMMUGMainView.mm". The Xserve's /var/log/slapd.log would start displaying the message "slapd73: bdb(dc=xxx,dc=xxx,dc=com): PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery" every second or so. Nobody could login to the box, not even local users at the console, and no service that required authentication would work (eg Mail, iChat server, etc)." So another admin suggested running the following in terminal as root user and after doing this it worked! 1) sudo to root sudo -i 2) shutdown the open directory server service org.openldap.slapd stop 3) dump a copy of the Open Directory database to an LDIF format text file mkdir /var/root/opendirectory cd /var/root/opendirectory slapcat -l dir.ldif 4) move the old (corrupt) database files out of the way (or remove them). cd /var/db/openldap/openldap-data mkdir SAVE mv *.bdb SAVE/ be sure you don't move, rename or delete the file named DB_CONFIG. It's needed. 5) recreate the database from the LDIF format file cd /var/root/opendirectory slapadd -l dir.ldif slapindex You will see some harmless warnings during slapadd. Ignore them. 6) restart open directory service org.openldap.slapd start Voila! It began running again. You should check the users/groups in workgroup manager for stray unrecognizable objects, as the corruption may have left some fragments of whatever was broken there. Just remove them in the usual way.

Hi Got a bit of a problem here. Just done been doing some maintanace on a NAS server which has a datastore for some of our VM's. Since I have rebooted the Nas box ESX4 has picked up the datastore again but now the VM's connected to that datastore are inaccessible. On investigation I have found that the datastore contents are showing contents for a different share on that NAS box and not the correct share where all the VM's are stored. I have never seen this issue and have tried to rescan the datastores but to no avail. Can anyone help me on this. I have logged a call to Vmware but just waiting for a call back but that could be anything up to 4 hours. Thanks

You could also use the managed content settings in Exchange 2007. Also if your users dont delete their deleted items but you want to force this to happen say every 120 days etc you can do this by creating managed content settings. Check out the useful videos for exchange 2007 @ Microsoft Exchange 2007 Training Clips View the video's for • What Are Managed Content Settings? 4:36 • Create a New Managed Default Folder and Add New Managed Content Settings 4:22 • Create a New Managed Custom Folder and Add Managed Content Settings 4:58 • Create a New Managed Folder Mailbox Policy 2:34 This should give you a good idea about journaling and all the other good things you can do with Exchange.

Hi I just wanted to know if anyone else is using the latest release of Retrospect for Mac and having the same issue as me and if they have found a way to resolve it. From looking at the Retrospect forum I think it maybe a bug... We are using build 8.1 (build 626) on our Mac server. We have an XRAID which has all the pupils work and this gets backed up to a freenas box which has 4tb of storage. I followed the instructions in the video for 5 day rotation and have created 5 media sets (mon-fri) and would like a particular backup to go to a particular media set. I want to be able to keep 5 days of backups and then for it to reuse the existing media set and delete whats already on there. When I first created the Media sets for the first week it backed up fine but now into the second week I keep getting the dreaded 'need media' message. I want it to delete the contents of the media set so I dont run out of space as our pupil work is quite large. So I have set a recycle/groom policy which I thought would sort it as I have set it to 1 day to groom the media. This doesnt seem to be working though. Does anyone know of a terminal script which I could use to delete the contents of what is on the nas box and then hopefully once that is deleted Retrospect will hopefully see it as a new media set and begin backing up without coming up with this need media message. Or Is there an alternative way I could backup to the NAS box. I want to schedule it to run backups and once I have set it I just want retrospect to manage the backups and for me to just to check to see if backups are being made successfully or if they have failed. This 'needs media' message, have other users had this? Thanks

I have tended to buy Tom Tom in the past but have heard good things about Garmin, I am tempted to purchase the Garmin 265t, can anyone recommend this model?

Hi Got an issue since we have upgraded our Active Directory DC's, DNS and DHCP to windows 2008. I think the problem is to do with DNS but want a second opinion and more importantly how to fix it. Previously when we had 2003 servers, when we wanted to join a XP, vista client to the domain we could just type in the domainname when joining the computer, our domain name is queensbridge but it now seems we have to type in the alternative domain name that was given to us when the domain was created which is queensbridge.pri. When we type in queensbridge and press return we receive the following error message: "The following error occured when DNS was queried for the service location (SRV) resource record used to locate a domain controller for domain queensbridge: The error was "DNS name does not exist" RCODE_NAME_ERROR I have also included an attachment of the error message. It seems like a DNS issue but am not sure how to resolve it. Do I just need to register the DNS SRV record for it to work? Have other members seen this problem before and provide any tips on how to sort Any tips would be greatly appreciated. Thanks dcdiag.txt

its ok I have sorted it. I had prevented users read access at a higher level and that was preventing a user to be able to read files of the DFS share, as soon as I restored read access to domain users it sorted itself out.

Hi A few years ago we created a package using Veritas winstall for a program called GamesBox. It was working fine until recently but now if a user attempts to run the application it comes up with an error which says "the feature you are trying to use is on a network resource that is unavailable. It works for administrator though which made me it must be a permissions problem. All our deployed packages sit on a DFS share on a windows 2003 server. I made sure that authenticated users had full access to the share and ACL permissions but it still doesnt work. I tried to give full permissions to the folder where this package resides and still it didnt work. thanks

Dear All I have a question regarding an old Linux box we have which is running Gentoo 2.6.17-gentoo-r4. We host a web service on this box. Our network has 1 2003 DC which we want to decomission very soon and 2 2008 DC's which were recently put in to replace our old 2003 servers. This 1 2003 dc seem to be the bain of our problems because when we did a test shutdown on the 2003 server we wanted to test to see if any of our services because my worry was a lot of other services around school relied on this server because it was the first server in the forest when our AD network was created about 5 years ago. We did indeed find that some of our Linux boxes stopped working when we did a test shutdown. When the 2003 server was up and running again, all linux services began working again. On investigation we found that the linux boxes had entries which explicity pointed to this 2003 server. When we tried changing them to point to the new DC's on the most part some of our Linux boxes began working, there was some issues but these were resolved. One server though is still giving us problems when we change it to the new settings, the web service which is running doesnt seem to run properly. This web services relies on Active Directory from the windows network because the way the program works is it looks up AD groups and users. The files which we amended were: /etc/krb5.conf [libdefaults] default_realm = domain name of school [realms] domainname>PRI = { kdc = neww2k8server.domainname.pri ‘ was originally oldserver2k3.domainname.pri kdc = neww2k8server.domainname ‘ was originally oldserver2k3.domainname.pri } /etc/samba/smb.conf [global] workgroup = domainname netbios name = nameoflinuxserver realm = domainname.pri server string = Reboot System Server security = ads encrypt passwords = Yes password server = old 2003 DC, new 2008 dc, new 2008 dc log file = /var/log/samba/%m.log max log size = 0 socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192 preferred master = False local master = No domain master = False dns proxy = No winbind separator = \ winbind enum user = yes winbind enum groups = yes winbind use default domain = yes idmap uid = 10000-20000 idmap gid = 10000-20000 We adjusted the line where it has password server. My understanding of Linux is beginner but I believe that this box may rely on Samba for it to work properly. I read on a few forums that maybe upgrading to the latest version of Samba may do the trick, as the Linux box is fairly old and with an old version of Samba it may have issues connecting to 2008 boxes. Not sure if this is related but I tried disabling NetBIOS over tcpip in the network settings on the 2003 server and found that when we went to the web page hosted by this linux server it comes up with a Internal server error "the server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request". If I enable Netbios on the 2k3 server again, it works again. I have only amended smb.conf and krb5.conf on the gentoo box, could there be other configs which could need changing? Any advice on this would be most appreciated. Thanks

Hi Got a issue with warranty with Acer. We have a laptop with 3 years warranty which we purchased 2 years ago. I purchased it with the aceradvantage pack. I thought I registered the warranty with Acer as I got an email back from them to say my aceradvantage pack was registered with the Laptop serial no. I kept the email and thought that would be enough if we needed to use the support. Now 2 years later the time has come to have it repaired due an issue. I found the email with the acer advantage register email. Phoned support up but they need me to go to the aceradvantage website and put in the aceradvantage details in along with a password. I didn't keep the original acer advantage packs because I thought I had all the information I needed in the email. Do I have any grounds to appeal with Acer? Any help would be much appreciated. I am suprised with how much is involved just to register a warranty with Acer. I think they purposely make it difficult so when it comes to claim if the customer misses any little part out they cannot claim. Thanks

Would someone kindly tell me where I can go about installing a KMS server? We have a schools agreement and I think setting up a KMS server may be best and then I can get all the domain computers/laptops to connect to the KMS server. If you do image deployment such as ghost, I assume you would also use a KMS key, as soon as each PC comes online with different GUID, it will contact the KMS server once joined to the domain? If someone could clarify that it would be most appreciated. Thanks