ranj

Hi I have a question regarding the future expansion of our VMware infrastrucuture at our school. We currently have 2 ESXi Hosts (HP DL380G5) which have embedded ESXi on the server. These are connected to NAS storage for their data stores. The backend will be improved and this will happen by replacing the NAS with a SAN, upgrade our esxi hosts to full ESX server rather than ESXi and introduce a 3rd host. Question I have is currently we have 2 HP DL380G5 hosts, I am undecided whether I purchase an identical host as the other 2 so adding a 3rd DL380G5 or could I go with the latest HP DL380 G6 server which works out more cost effective as I want to ensure there is no compatibility issues when using the advanced feautures of VMware such as DRS and Vmotion. We currently have the VSphere 4 standard agreement but will look at upgrading this to either Advanced or enterprise plus. Does anyone know what issues can happen when using a slight variant of host, If I introduced a 3rd host which has a faster processor and slight different architecture than the other 2. Could I run into problems when using features like Vmotion or can vmotion work fine with different variants of ESX hosts? I am getting mixed information from the suppliers I am talking to about this and I am struggling to find any VMware specific whitepapers on this subject. From other peoples experiences would I be better advised going for an identical 3rd host as the other 2 to ensure there are no issues with the advanced features of VMware? Any advice on this or access to VMware specific whitepapers would be most appreciated.

Sorry forgot that you needed sound with them. These have sound but are 4:3 - Novatech 19" 4:3 Protective Acrylic Screen Surface Standard LCD Monitor - Black/Silver

GNR make some hard glass screen, we buy them and they are great. Come with 3 year warranty, VGA and DVI and come in 4:3 or 16:9 and very well priced. 19" widescreen are: NOVATECH 19" Widescreen Hard Glass LCD Monitor - Black/Silver and they do them in 4:3 which are cheaper. If your buying loads Novatech will do you good bulk discount. Send me a PM and I'll pass you details of our account manager there. I am hearding that manufacturers are starting to phase out Hard glass screens, can some one confirm this. Other manufacturers are AG Neovo, problem with them they come with a separate adapter which can mean more complex wires, I would recommend screen with internal power supply. Iiyama do hard glass as well but tend to be more expensive.

Best place to check and to follow best practises would be the technet whitepaper on terminal services. It can be found @ Windows Server®*2008 Terminal Services http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754746(WS.10).aspx Hope that helps

Hi I have recently purchased a Netgear Readynas RND2000 from a reseller. This is plugged into my wireless router which is a Netgear WPN824v2. I have noticed a problem recently when I download 2 or more bit torrents using the built in bittorrent program on my Readynas that after a few minutes of the downloads beginning, I lose connectivity via the web interface and RAIDar in accessing the console, any network drives connected via the Readynas also become inaccessible. I am also not able to ping the readynas either. The only way for me to resolve is to press the power button for 5 seconds for it shutdown and then I turn it back on again and connectivity comes back. It only seems to happen when using the bittorrent application and whilst its downloading torrents. I have checked the logs and in the diagnostic.log I cam across the following: Network ------------------------------- * There have been an abnormally high number of unrecoverable TCP retransmits. This is usually caused by marginal hardware somewhere on the network, including cable, switch, and network interfaces. Errors are also appearing in the httpd_errors.log. I have just taken a copy of todays logs and it says the following: [sat Jul 04 07:23:27 2009] [warn] RSA server certificate CommonName (CN) `192.168.1.4' does NOT match server name!? Bad free() ignored (PERL_CORE) at /frontview/lib/Frontview.pm line 2. Bad free() ignored (PERL_CORE) at /frontview/lib/Frontview.pm line 2. [sat Jul 04 07:24:15 2009] [warn] RSA server certificate CommonName (CN) `192.168.1.4' does NOT match server name!? [sat Jul 04 07:24:15 2009] [notice] Apache/2.2.6 (Debian) mod_ssl/2.2.6 OpenSSL/0.9.8e DAV/2 mod_apreq2-20051231/2.6.0 mod_perl/2.0.3 Perl/v5.8.8 configured -- resuming normal operations [sat Jul 04 11:24:29 2009] [notice] caught SIGTERM, shutting down [sat Jul 04 11:26:36 2009] [warn] RSA server certificate CommonName (CN) `192.168.1.4' does NOT match server name!? Bad free() ignored (PERL_CORE) at /frontview/lib/Frontview.pm line 2. Bad free() ignored (PERL_CORE) at /frontview/lib/Frontview.pm line 2. Bad free() ignored (PERL_CORE) at /frontview/lib/Frontview.pm line 2. Bad free() ignored (PERL_CORE) at (eval 2) line 3. [sat Jul 04 11:27:26 2009] [warn] RSA server certificate CommonName (CN) `192.168.1.4' does NOT match server name!? [sat Jul 04 11:27:26 2009] [notice] Apache/2.2.6 (Debian) mod_ssl/2.2.6 OpenSSL/0.9.8e DAV/2 mod_apreq2-20051231/2.6.0 mod_perl/2.0.3 Perl/v5.8.8 configured -- resuming normal operations [sat Jul 04 11:32:30 2009] [notice] caught SIGTERM, shutting down [sat Jul 04 11:32:51 2009] [warn] RSA server certificate CommonName (CN) `192.168.1.4' does NOT match server name!? Bad free() ignored (PERL_CORE) at /frontview/lib/Frontview.pm line 2. Bad free() ignored (PERL_CORE) at /frontview/lib/Frontview.pm line 2. Bad free() ignored (PERL_CORE) at (eval 2) line 3. [sat Jul 04 11:33:02 2009] [warn] RSA server certificate CommonName (CN) `192.168.1.4' does NOT match server name!? [sat Jul 04 11:33:02 2009] [notice] Apache/2.2.6 (Debian) mod_ssl/2.2.6 OpenSSL/0.9.8e DAV/2 mod_apreq2-20051231/2.6.0 mod_perl/2.0.3 Perl/v5.8.8 configured -- resuming normal operations [sat Jul 04 14:16:21 2009] [notice] caught SIGTERM, shutting down [sat Jul 04 14:18:31 2009] [warn] RSA server certificate CommonName (CN) `192.168.1.4' does NOT match server name!? Bad free() ignored (PERL_CORE) at /frontview/lib/Frontview.pm line 2. Bad free() ignored (PERL_CORE) at /frontview/lib/Frontview.pm line 2. Bad free() ignored (PERL_CORE) at /frontview/lib/Frontview.pm line 2. [sat Jul 04 14:18:56 2009] [warn] RSA server certificate CommonName (CN) `192.168.1.4' does NOT match server name!? [sat Jul 04 14:18:56 2009] [notice] Apache/2.2.6 (Debian) mod_ssl/2.2.6 OpenSSL/0.9.8e DAV/2 mod_apreq2-20051231/2.6.0 mod_perl/2.0.3 Perl/v5.8.8 configured -- resuming normal operations [sat Jul 04 15:34:45 2009] [notice] caught SIGTERM, shutting down [sat Jul 04 16:00:46 2009] [warn] RSA server certificate CommonName (CN) `192.168.1.4' does NOT match server name!? Bad free() ignored (PERL_CORE) at /frontview/lib/Frontview.pm line 2. Bad free() ignored (PERL_CORE) at /frontview/lib/Frontview.pm line 2. Bad free() ignored (PERL_CORE) at /frontview/lib/Frontview.pm line 2. Bad free() ignored (PERL_CORE) at /frontview/lib/Frontview.pm line 2. Bad free() ignored (PERL_CORE) at /frontview/lib/Frontview.pm line 2. Bad free() ignored (PERL_CORE) at /frontview/lib/get_handler.pm line 2. Bad free() ignored (PERL_CORE) at /frontview/lib/get_handler.pm line 2. Bad free() ignored (PERL_CORE) at /frontview/lib/get_handler.pm line 2. [sat Jul 04 16:01:01 2009] [warn] RSA server certificate CommonName (CN) `192.168.1.4' does NOT match server name!? [sat Jul 04 16:01:01 2009] [notice] Apache/2.2.6 (Debian) mod_ssl/2.2.6 OpenSSL/0.9.8e DAV/2 mod_apreq2-20051231/2.6.0 mod_perl/2.0.3 Perl/v5.8.8 configured -- resuming normal operations When not using the bittorrent application, the readynas seems to be stable. Has anyone else suffered similar issues with this NAS box? Are the settings I need to change on either the router or readynas to eliminate the problem? Any help would be most appreciated. Thanks

I think it means go to another machine on the network and type in the Ip address of your new esx box, once you have typed it in it should offer you some options, one of them is to download the VI client which you can install on a windows machine and then begin creating VM's through there.

Hi will you be purchasing a purpose built storage case to house the 14 HDD's? If you are building it yourself, ensure you build it so that cooling is considered. you going to need some decent system to keep it running at comfortable temps!

I tried this as well as adjusting a registry entry and the MTU rating on both the network card on the laptop as well as the NAS box and it has worked a treat. No more long delays in playing back music, pictures also load a lot faster. Haven't tried video playback though. Some useful guides I looked at to resolve the issue: Disable TCP Auto-Tuning to Solve Slow Network, Cannot Load Web Page or Download Email Problems in Vista My Digital Life ::. Kitz - Vista MTU .:: Thanks for the help. much appreciated.

Hi Folks we have 3 domain controllers all running windows 2003 (DC with FMSO roles has SP1 and the other 2 have SP2). One of the SP2 DC's is about to suffer an imminent hard drive failure and I wanted to decommission it before it dies. We have also had intermittent issues with some workstations on the domain not picking up policies and correctly logging people on. I suspect that these PC's are trying to authenticate to this dodgy DC and the communication between the two isn't happening. The problem is I tryed to DCpromo this server yesterday and couldn't remove it as a DC. when I ran dcpromo it seemed like it was going to decommision itself until I got the following error: The operation failed because: Active Directory could not configure the computer account SERVER$ on the remote domain controller firstDCindomain.domain.com. "Access is denied." Specify an account with Enterprise Adminstrator privileges to the forest, home.domain.com. I have checked thisI keep getting the same error message over and over. Its odd because I have done various promotion and decommison of DC's and never had this trouble in the past. In fact a year ago I had to decommision this exact server and repromote this exact server after some maintenance and never had a problem. My worry is I have got a feeling that either active directory may be in a slight mess or its related to group policy objects. I have seen a few issues appearing on some of our workstations which relate to not picking up gpo objects. I have read that i can do a dcpromo/force removal and this is likely to work, my worry is this could cause issues as I have to use a util called ntsdutil to clear out active direcory, this sounds scary and I am not comfortable with doing this method in case I make the problem worse. Is there something I could run which could check active directory and group policy for all the DC's to help me identify the problem. I have run dcdiag on all 3 domain controllers and the problem server did bring up more issues than the other 2, and it was pointing to the File replication service and replication issues. Its like it cannot communicate with the other DC's. I have manually tried to do replication through sites and services and this works without any errors. So I am confused. Please help!

Hi I have just recently brought a Netgear ReadyNAS box RND2000 and one of the main purposes I purchased it was so I could keep all my music centrally and then listen to it via a networked mapped drive and then use something like windows media player or VLC to play the music. Problem is I am justing find accessing music, video even pictures to be a struggle, it just seems really slow generally (for example it can take a minute or two just for a song to buffer or a picture preview to show up). I am trying to establish where the problem may be. Maybe its my wireless router (it has a 4 port 100mb switch bullt in), the readynas is 1gbps, would I see an improvement if i gpgraded the switch to gigabit? It seems to perform slightly better on my wife's Mac, she used iTunes and the readynas is setup as an iTunes server and performance generally is better through iTunes. I also use my nokia phone to stream music from the Nas box and that seems to be ok too. If anyone can advise on how I could better improve the performance it would be most appreciated. I would rather not upgrade my switch if i didnt have too as it does a decent job to serve wireless and the internet to all computers.

Hi Just to let you know I got this working, I found an article at the freenas knowledge base which had the answer: FreeNAS Knowledgebase / 303. How can I mount a partition, drive or RAID over 2TB? If you have storage which is over 2tb it needs to be setup in the following way: ►WebGUI ►Disks ► Management:select your disk(raid ) and on “Preformated FS” select “UFS (EFI/GPT) with Soft Updates (use 8% space disk)” ►WebGUI ►Disks ► Management ► Format : select your disk(raid) on “File system” select “UFS(EFI/GPT) with Soft Updates (use 8% space disk)” ►WebGUI ► Disks ► Mount Point: Mount your disk(raid) on "Partition" select GPT tryed this and it works. Finally got it working!! Thanks for the suggestions.

Sorry I also checked that the RAID controller was compatible with the latest edition of freebsd and it was. thanks

Hi i'm afraid I am back. I am still having major issues with setting up the FreeNas box. I was in luck with the network issue as Freenas just released a new release a few days ago and that resolved the problem for the network issue I was having. Now I have run into another problem. This time to do with setting up the disk storage and for freenas to see it. This is the setup Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L Motherboard Intel Core 2 Extreme Socket 775 Intel G31 Micro ATX Gigabit Ethernet Intel Core 2 Duo (E7400) 2.8GHz Processor 3072KB L2 Cache 1066MHz FSB Antec - PSU/Basiq Power 500W ATX 12V PSU - £45.30ex 1232613 Kingston - Memory/2GB 800MHz DDR2 Non-ECC CL5 DIMM Adaptec 4-Port SATA/SAS PCI-Express 128MB RAID 3405 Card (RoHS) – Kit - 4x ST31500341AS Seagate HD Barracuda 7200.11/1.5TB SATA 7200rpm 32MB for data 1 X 40gb Sata drive for boot purposes only So the Freenas server has the latest release on there. Its booting fine, I can access through web and all is well except I am having problems creating the disk. Now I did setup the disks via RAID5 through the Adaptec hardware controller, was this the right thing to do? or would I be better erasing the RAID structure from the controller and letting freenas manage this? I suspect the option I have chosen is better because the hardware is dealing with any possible HD failure but does freenas have an issue with this? So basically all 4 1.5tb disks are configured as 1 big raid5 volume to give me 4tb usable storage. Freenas see's this through the console but can anyone offer advice on how to get it working. The only part I have got working is adding the disk through disk management using ufs file system and the disk is 'online' In disk mount option i get the following message •Wrong partition type or partition number through disk mount If I try to format the RAID5 volume I get •Can't format the OS origin disk! In the command output it says: Deleting MBR and partition table... dd: /dev/aacd0: Operation not permitted Creating partition... gpt create: unable to open device '/dev/aacd0': No such file or directory gpt add: unable to open device '/dev/aacd0': No such file or directory Creating filesystem with 'Soft Updates'... newfs: /dev/aacd0p1: could not find special device Done! It seems like its half doing it and then failing but I just cant see the drive when creating a afp share for example as I am going to use it to backup our Mac server data. Any help would be really appreciated and guaranteed thank you. I am at a loss with this one. I'm tempted to look at openfiler if I cant get it working through freenas.

Hi I have just purchased a Netgear Readynas box for home (the Readnas RND2000 XRAID NAS) and it seems like a great box to keep a backup of my critical data and stream music and video. Now that will take about 100gb in space and i'll still have 400gb odd to play with and it got me thinking if I could host all my test VM's i have created using VMware workstation, at the moment I am using a local machine but its lacks disk space, I have tried putting VM's on a external drive and performance is ok on this as well but for me it would be ideal if i could store them on the readynas and open them up through VM workstation. Obviously putting it on a NAS box could be problematic, has anyone tried doing this on one of these ReadyNAS boxes? its probably not designed for this type of data and traffic but if anyone has got it working i'd be interested to hear any feedback. One of the potential problems I see is I am going to be running it through a wireless router with a 4 port 100mb switch and see that as a problem, would replacing it to a gigabit switch make a huge difference or would it still be slow? I'd appreciate any advice on this. Thanks

I wanted to ask, anyone who setup prism did you manage to put the prism package on a share on the server or did you have to create a package for it? If so do you know where we could get hold of an msi for it? What we are thinking at our site is to deploy an eportal link on all users desktop and then force all users to use that or we could have a link on our webpage to run the app. My technician is looking into it and has managed to deploy the prism software but if the link is clicked it then shows the prism app which then needs a user to define the website that they want to go to. Is there anyway to automate this? your help would be most appreciated.

I am unable to resolve a issue with FreeNAS from LiveCD 0.691 (latest x86 version) I am currently building a freenas box with an integrated Realtek RTL8111c NIC. When I run the console to assign my network card ("Assign Interface"), auto detection doesn't recognize the card. Can anyone help?

I am in a similar position now, I need to revisit our backup and DR strategy and i would be grateful for any suggestion on how best to use our existing kit. This is our current kit and this is the plan: backup kit hardware Overland SNAP Server with 9tb usable RAID 5 storage with SATA disks. Software included was Netvault Bakbone with 500gb VTL. 4tb 2u custom built Freenas box 2tb Windows 2003 server utilising a perl backup script. Sony AIT2 50gb native tape drive...Very old Currently the SNAP server is one of our main storage boxes, it serves out a variety of data such as various shared drives (e.g. staff, admin shared areas), iScsi target for home directories and profiles, use Microsoft iSCSI initator to do this and it also is a backup target for our apple XRAID data. The FreeNas is a secondary backup location for our apple data and we also use it for archival storage. The 2tb windows server is where all our Microsoft servers daily and weekly backups are stored. Its a combination of a perl script and XXcopy which runs on a daily/weekly basis which takes a copy of the data and dumps it to this server and it sorts in a nice format with dates and will delete the oldest copy automatically, will do 1 weeks worth mon-thu of critical data and then on weekend will do a whole backup of all shares on all our various windows servers and store it in a weekly folder. When we restore we simply open the server as a network drive, locate the file in a nice folder structure and drag and drop back to the live data. The 50gb tape drive is installed on our MIS server, as well as doing a copy of the server onto the windows backup server, we also backup the data onto tape using Veritas backup exec Ver 9. Is slow, but seems to be reliable and has good reporting features. problems with this setup and possible solutions We currently do whole daily backups of data, and my knowledge of perl is limited. This is full backups and the backup windows are slowly increasing, it can take approx 5 hours to do a daily backup. Currently do this in the evening but can impact on performance for our VPN users and my worry is it will impact once our VLE is in (Frogteacher). A weekend backup with all the data takes approx 18 hours. Once our SAN arrives the snap server will become the a NAS box with all the backups, hope is to keep up to 4 weeks worth of data. I was thinking of Rsync to backup data as it will work similar to our perl script, Can this do incremental backups and erase older copies of backups? Is it known to be reliable or have other schools suffered problems? Would I best use the software designed for the SNAP server (bakbone netvault virtual tape library software) is very expensive to purchase APPROX 7K!!! if i want a 6tb VTL as well as plugins for exchange and SQL. I have looked at an alternative such as SEP Sesam which is approx 4k and seems to do more or less the same job. Does anyone recommend this? The freenas box will continue to be used for a secondary backup of the MAC data and archival storage and the windows backup server is going to be located in a remote location and my plan is a weekly backup will be done onto the snap server and then NAS will send a secondary copy over to the windows server at a remote location. What do fellow edugeekers think of this, would there be a better way? A lot of of our servers are being moved to VMware so need a backup solution to backup our virtual servers, can anyone recommend how I would do this? would it be best to use something like VCB? Solutions I am currently thinking of is Rysnc, Bakbone Netvault, Sep Sesam, Retrospect? Which schools use any of these solutions, any recommendation, is there any other software you would recommend, budget on backup is approx 5k. Thanks

Thanks, I have no ideas of what binoculars to get. I dont want to spend too much, budget would be approx £100, could i get some decent ones for this?

I have a keen interest in civil aviation and would like to know if there are handy binoculars available to watch planes flying at a really high altitude from my loft room, say FL350. I am looking for binoculars that is strong enough to spot and recognize a plane type and airline flying in clear sky when it is passing over my house. When I watch planes crossing in clear blue sky, I wonder what airline could it be. The model and price etc of bincoulars will be very helpful. I dont want to spend too much as its only an interest and i'm just curious of the sort of aircraft passing over my house. Usually aircraft passing is at a very high altitude, say between 30 -- 40 thousand feet. Any suggestions or help will be appreciated. Thanks

For ultimate redundancy and performance, does anyone know if an E-SATA external with RAID caddy exists? I need to get some storage but am struggling whether i go for performance with a external drive with esata or have the flexibility of NAS so I can access music, photos from any laptop, PDA or PC around the house. Any suggestions? I slowly going for NAS because of the flexibility. Anyone recently purchased the Netgear XRAID readynas with free 500gb drive? I am looking at this at the moment, it seems a good deal thanks

Yes I am dual booting with Ubuntu Linux. I have tried to run sudo dkg-reconfigure tzdata but it doesnt like the command, am I typing it wrong? thanks

I think you need to explain that all the load on this one server could be a bit too much, and usually a server life is approx 5 years but you could say that if the school are considering adding laptops, the back end has got to invested into as well. If not expect problems. You could also mention that adding a second server will add some redundancy/resilence to your network and will help support any further IT you put in. You could say that the old server will be used for less intensive tasks or something similar. Try running server performance monitor if its a windows 2003 server. Download details: Server Performance Advisor This will allow you to identify what sort of load your current server is faced with and will present it in what is hopefully a easy to understand report, but feel free to ask questions if you get stuck. Hopefully then you could provide useful evidence to your manager about the workload of the server.

I have a laptop with Windows 7, recently upgraded from vista. I have had this problem for some time and was well before I upgraded to 7. I have noticed that the clock is always exactly one hour behind. When I correct it manually it will be fine for that day, but will reset the next day. Is there a hot fix that I need to apply? How do I fix this problem? I initially thought it could be a battery problem, but wouldn't that just give an odd time, i struggling to understand why its always exactly 1 hour behind. Just for further info, the laptop is dual booted and has ubuntu linux 8.04 and linux has the same issue so i am sure its a problem with laptop. If I go into BIOS the time is incorrect in there as well. Any advice would be most appreciated. I interested to hear of anyone who has had this exact problem. Its really difficult for me to change the battery on this as its a laptop and I have tried to unscrew a few screws but cannot seem to find it and will probably need a specialist to look at it. I rather not do this if I can....

Can't Wait!! I have to say I have been very impressed with 7 even when its in rc phase.

Ahh this is very interesting, as we have had issues with general internet and email access being slow, hanging at times and the only way to resolve is end task in task manager. I also understand that link2ict is reporting internet issues for Birmingham schools, Can other Bham schools confirm this? are you having the same problems as reported on this thread? Our eportal actually seems to be ok, it has broken a few things since the upgrade though but it seems to be running ok, our problems are intermittent internet and accessing OWA in school.