ranj

Hi I am having a problem with one of our windows 2003 servers where all of a sudden I am not able to login using RDC. It comes up with the following error but it comes up briefly and then immediatly exits out of RDC. The error is: You cannot initiate a Remote Desktop Connection because the Windows logon software on the remote computer has been replaced by incompatible software PCIgina.dll To correct this problem, please have the administrator of the remote computer contact the program vendor for a version that is compatible with Windows. I found a knowledge article on the microsoft support website but wasn't very helpful. Has anyone suffered this problem and is there a way to resolve. Quite suprisingly I wasn't able to find a solution using google. The link: You receive an error message when you attempt to establish a Remote Desktop connection to connect to another computer I attach a picture file of the error. Thanks

I am not sure if the following would help. I believe there is a add on pack similar to exmerge which should allow you to do a search if you know the file name of the attachment. More info can be found You Had Me At EHLO... : Exchange Server 2007 Export Mailbox task

I am not sure if this should go in the virtual machines./thin clients section but the work continues based on the original post here. As an update on this I have managed to successfully transfer all FMSO roles to this test server. I did this by seizing the roles and used ntdsutil tool to action this. Thanks for the reply FN-GM. Now the next stage is I want to see if I can use this network in my new test environment, I have added a XP client to the virtual team and am trying to get it to join the test domain but I am having a bit trouble with the server issueing this client a IP address from the DHCP server. I have created a new scope on the server as the old scope referenced to another network. I want this DHCP server to issue out an IP from the scope I have created to this client. On other similar posts I was told to remove any virtual configuration which may be set in vmware so VMware does NOT issue out any ip addresses. There was a DHCP set in the virtual network editor which I have now removed. This is where my knowledge is beginning to fade, I not very good with DNS and IP configurations. I believe I need to setup a static ip on the server but don't know what information to put in. I dont know what the default gateway will be. If i try to put the ip of the gateway which my local laptop is set to (my home internet network 192.168.1.1) it doesnt work. Currently both are set to dhcp automatic but both are saying network cable is unplugged. I am not sure if I have to setup network settings on the individual vm's, team or in the virtual config. I am not sure what I should set both the server and client. There are choices in vmware of bridged, nat and host only. I believe active directory is working but I am not sure if I have setup DHCP and DNS properly and am trying to get the internet to work on both the server and client. The internet would come from my home router and I need to somehow get the server to pick up this router so I can get internet, I will then instruct DHCP to handle the DNS, IP addressing and gateway for the client PC's. If anyone could offer any advice on this I would be most appreciated. Thanks

I'm running Skype 3.5 Windows and was wondering if its possible so you could talk to people on MSN through Skype? I know you can import msn contacts into skype but you initiate conversations with msn contacts? It be good to use one IM system rather than a variety. I do pref the apps that can be installed on a PC rather than a web based version. Thanks

Dear All I am trying to build an example worst case scenario where if we had a fire in the server room at our school I could build back the network by one DC which didnt have the FMSO roles assigned to it. Can this be done? I am currently testing some software called Acronis True image echo server with universal restore and I have backed up the boot volume of one of our domain controllers and restored this server into a test VM using Vmware workstation. The DC that I have taken a backup of is one of 3 DC's in our school but this DC is a server which doesnt have any FSMO roles assigned to it such as PDC emulator and infrastructure master. Those roles are currently managed by another DC which is our original DC when AD which built from new. Once I restored this DC as a VM machine, for the most part it seems to have successfully restored. It booted into the server I was able to login and so far I have not had any BSOD errors. Once I checked the AD information i found all the users and machines from the school were restored but when I looked at the FSMO roles it had an error message which would be obvious as this server wasnt assigned any of these roles. What I want to test is if its a simple case of giving this standalone DC these FMSO roles through this virtual test environment or do I still need to add the original FMSO DC into this test environment as well for it to be happy and begin replication? I would rather not do that because as part of the testing I want to see if its possible to bring a whole network backup with a DC that wasn't the first DC in the forest. I am trying to create the scenario if the primary DC had a unrecoverable catastrophic failure, how would the rest of the network react once the FMSO roles are not assigned to a server. I have looked at some information about this such as: Using Ntdsutil.exe to transfer or seize FSMO roles to a domain controller How to remove data in Active Directory after an unsuccessful domain controller demotion - What I want to ask do these solutions only work if the DC which had these roles is still alive? what happens if this server had a serious hard drive corruption and I couldn't boot from it at all, would i still be able to seize the role? because what I am reading to seize the role you still need to be able to boot into the DC which had these roles in the first place. I know I am trying to predict something which probably would never happen but am keen to see the results and see if its possible for me to bring a network back to useable state with a part working DC. My intention is to add another DC into this virtual team which will be based on server 2008 once, transfer all AD info to this new 2008 box and demote the old 2003 DC. Just for the record all the DC's we have at the moment are all RAID 5/1 backed so serious hard drive corruption should hopefully never happen! If anyone thinks I should test DR in a better way, please feel free to comment, like i said before this is me just playing around and understanding how it all works but if fellow edugeekers think I am doing this in a real long winded way then please make suggestions. Finally Acronis true image software is excellent, been really impressed with it so far. Its very easy to use... Thanks

Thankyou both for your replies. Ahh I didn't realise that we could only use 1,6,11 due to overlapping. What we have setup currently is 2 SSID's on each radio. Radio 1 has a SSID which we are going to use to configure laptops on which then connect to a IAS radius server. All laptops will be 54g laptops but we may need to connect some older laptops which have B connectivity. So ideally i could do with both but if I need to pick one that I set this up as G only. Radio 2 has a visitor SSID which we were going to use for PDAs, phones and general visitor access. Again I feel we need a b/g setup so we accomodate different setups. There are no standalone wireless devices in the area. If fellow edugeekers think I should look at setting it up in a different way then please feel free to let me know. This is what I am thinking of doing now based on feedback. Switch 1( Top floor): Radio 1 (G only)- channel 1, radio 2 (b/G) - channel 11 Switch 2(ground floor): Radio (G only)1 - channel 6, radio 2 (b/G) - channel 9 thanks

I have a problem with our extricom solution. We have 2 switches in our school and it seems that laptops will connect to one switch fine (the one on the top floor) but if i take a laptop down to the ground floor it then should use the switch and APs which cover the ground floor but the laptop isn't able to login successfully. I am not sure if the channels are causing the issue, all our thin AP's across the building have 2 radios built in, on the switches the channels are configured as follows: Switch 1( Top floor): Radio 1- channel 6, radio 2 - channel 11 Switch 2(ground floor): Radio 1 - channel 3, radio 2 - channel 9 Has anyone had this problem when your able to connect to one switch but not another? Thanks

If you already have netsupport I personally wouldn't purchase it. Then again Sanako is good for things such as language labs as the teacher can play a clip and then teacher can direct the sound to an inidivudual pupil or a group of pupils. Sanako is good for that.

I not got it myself personally but I know from experience that when I had to setup my uncles email into outlook. It was a nightmare! and the support was poor. Had to rely on forums such as edugeek to assist with the problem!

Excellent thread, I am looking into doing this as well. Is there a sepearate application which does P2V migration. Is this app free?

I would recommend SNAP servers, a bit expensive for a NAS box but the AD integration is excellent, you can copy NFS, AFP shares also to it, you can snapshot the shares and very simple to access the shares whether its a windows or mac client. can be expensive though I think they retail for about £2500 but you can add more storage as your schools grows and for that reason its a good buy. Used to be Adaptec but now been brought by Overland. Touch wood not had any problems with it but we use it for a mixture of backup and shared drive storage.

Hi we have a Ubuntu server which is our web server which hosts the school website along with some other web type things. I have a question regarding forwarding requests to another site which sits on the sub level of htdocs Our current site can be access at http://www.schoolname.bham.sch.uk but a joomla site has been created and sits in /var/www/joomla and we now want this website to be active when external users hit http://www.schoolname.bham.sch.uk It may be a simple question but how do we forward all requests to http://www.schoolname.bham.sch.uk/joomla. We rather they go to http://www.schoolname.bham.sch.uk and it automatically forwards to http://www.schoolname.bham.sch.uk/joomla Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

sorted all Birmingham Schools will not be closed tommorow . see BGfL - BGfL Homepage - BGfL Homepage 2008

Agree. Have to say the UAC issues seems to be far better resolved in Windows 7. Vista was a pain with this and your right it doesnt make sense to upgrade to Vista now.

I agree its always overhyped! It be good if our schools are closed so I can work from my bed. hehe. It won't be a day of rest for me though as I got development plans to write..

Our school communicated to all parents when we embarked on the scheme that the IT department in school will take NO responsibility with repairing laptops from this scheme. We have had a few issues where we have had to replace some DOA but the message seems to have got across. LFP scheme is bad idea if the school takes responsibility for repairing the machines, it then bogs down vital technician time. Just make SLT aware that this cannot happen unless they are willing to pay for an extra pair of hands or two.

I competely agree with some of the comments made here, a lot of techie's are worried that introducing completely new ways of working with IT is going to bog them down. I agree that this can happen if not planned correctly but you need to give it a shot on a smaller scale and if it doesnt work at least you have tried it. I am looking into the future at the school I work at and the vision I hope is once our VLE is being well used the hope is some pupils can bring in the laptops that have been given to them (laptop for pupils scheme) and use the wireless network to connect to the internet only to access the school VLE. Similar to how its done in universities where a laptop which isn't configured/setup by the school but the pupils get filtered/locked down capability to the internet (VLAN?) and the hope is we promote anytime anywhere learning. Before any of this is possible, as a network manager I would want to ensure that the infrastructure is capable to handle such a load and the school will support me if they think it is out of our scope or they can not provide sufficient funds for an infrastructure project. Does anyone know how this is done, I believe with Cisco products its done with the Network Access Control. We have an Extricom system. As network managers we should try to facilitate these new technologies because students and staff are effectively our customers, without them we wouldn't have a job and I believe its an injustice to our students to not better prepare them for the world of work or college. One issue I see with laptops coming into school is charging them. I know the school are looking to purchase school lockers and wanted to know if there any solutions out there where you can integrate Power sockets into lockers for laptops to be charged in. Someone tell me if this is a ridiculus idea.. but I struggling to find ways where you could charge laptops in school. Remember these are not school laptops and are the pupils laptops, so the school won't be responsible if the laptops are not charged for use in a lesson or to be used in school, but to assist students it would be good to have a solution of some sort where students could charge their laptops in school. Have other schools put some sort of provision in for students to go and use their laptops whilst charging or are there any other solutions out there for charging laptops (Not laptop trolleys or standalone charging areas). Any solutions with power and lockers integrated? Thanks

If you could me know I would be very grateful. Thanks Chilbs

We have an extricom solution which offers the blanket technology. As we have 2 managed switches with the 2 radio AP's option. Can we set the same channel number on both Switches for say Radio 1 or do they have to be on different channels on different managed switches. We have 2 SSID's setup a school one and a visitor one. I want to set the school wireless option on both switch to Channel 6 on switch 1 but not sure if i set channel 6 on switch 2 if they will interfere. If anyone else has this solution, I'd be interested in the best way to set it up. Thanks

I would also recommend the HP 3005n as its got a heavy duty cycle and you can get 2 types of toners for it a standard and high capacity. good very good reporting tools via its web admin site for it admins.

Hi All We are about to embark on a brand new Sharepoint VLE solution and I want to invest a bit on our backend at the same time. We been Sharepoint for the last 12 months but haven't been able to build it as fast as we would have liked and require outside support to assist us. My biggest gripe with the network at the moment is I think the DR setup could be a lot better, the school have recently purchased an office block about 1/2 mile down the road for additional office space. We currently have a small network of about 30 machines over there and the two buildings are connected via a point to point Motorola wireless bridge. I want to make use of this building to aid in disaster recovery. I like the idea of Virtualising Servers, we recently have virtualised our Web and Proxy server using VMware ESXi and have purchased the foundation/vmcenter pack on top of this. This is running on 2 separate hypervisor nodes and then are connected to an iSCSI NAS box (Overland SNAP Server 520) which has terrabytes of storage. I wanted to know what options I have with developing a backend which can replicate between 2 sites, the same data, if one site is playing up i can reroute all traffic to the other site or do it in a way that the main building is the primary, if someone terrible happened at the main building all traffic could go from the office building. I know I dont have the great features of VMware enterprise where it does live migration but I happy to do this manually in this type of scenario. Also is there a way it can load balance if I went with option 1. What type of hardware would we need to invest in at the second site? We don't have a SAN and use the SNAP server as our main storage, it seems to be able to serve files out ok but it could be better during peak times and we rely a lot on this device not going down (so far we have been ok) but I am worried that we are over reliant on it and want to change things. I am thinking as part of the VLE project if it would be worth migrating all information to a SAN and then use the SNAP server as a backup server. Would other members recommend a SAN or should i stick with the SNAP? Also am I taking a risk by asking the company we choose for the VLE to virtualise our sharepoint VLE/SQL? At the moment there isn't much load on our 2 new HP DL380's with 1 quad core and 8gb ram but one is running the web server VM and the other is doing the Squid proxy VM, both are connected to SNAP server for storage. I was thinking of adding further VM's to these nodes. On top of the other developments we have 2 exchange servers (1 staff and 1 students) both running standard edition and the staff email server is nearly 4 years old. I was thinking of migrating all staff mailboxes to the students exchange server. Can I do this? is there any limitation with standard where I can have 2 separate mailbox groups? Also have any schools virtualised their MIS systems (SQL), Facility CMIS and eportal to be precise. We seem to suffer from a lot of memory leaks on this separate server and am thinking of putting this onto a newer server or virtualising it to our DL380s. Any advice from other schools who have already done this would be most appreciated.. Thank you.

Gosh thats a bit of a Risk, A single DC setup! What happens if it fails!

I have been pretty impressed with it, on a VM machine it seems to be fairly stable as well and more responsive.

Dear All We seem to be having an issue with iMovie in our school. When teachers want to retrieve footage of one of our Hard disk/Mini DV camcorders they use iMovie to import the movie, this produce quite a large DV raw file. iMovie will then split the movie and the teacher will then pick the clips they want to use and drag these into a shared area for a teacher to use. When students begin to use these files, they will open iMovie and then go to the shared area and drag the clips into iMovie but when they do this it can take up to 30-45 minutes to import a clip. For example if we have a import a 110mb MOV clip which is approx 10 minutes long it will take up to 30 minutes. We originally thought it was an issue with the network but on investigation we did the same thing on a local mac and had the same problem, and this eliminated the network altogether. We found also that when a clip like a 100mb mov clip is imported, imovie seems to want to convert this into a raw DV file and the output size of this 100mb file can then end up to be about 2gb! Could other schools tell me how they use video in iMovie, do other schools suffer the same problems? is there an alternative solutions? I have been told by a Mac reseller that iMovie will convert all movies regardless of what the initial format is. They have suggested we use final cut express or ffmpegX which will allow us to convert the movie into a format that retains the quality but has a far less file size. Any advice on this would be most appreciated Thanks

Dear All There is one particular iMac in our school which seems to suffer from intermittent power problems. We actually sent it to Apple because we thought it had a power supply failure and it seems that wasn't the issue and the Mac came back to us unrepaired. This iMac can be very temperamental, sometime you can turn it on and it will boot up fine but then after 3-10 minutes the mac will just switch itself off, sometimes it won't switch on at all, and sometimes it comes on but you can hear the fan whirring and is fairly loud and no display appears. We consulted Apple about this and they said it may be that we need to reset the system management controller and we can do this by following these instructions: Intel-based iMac, Intel-based Mac mini: How to reset the System Management Controller This solution doesnt seem to work for us, at the moment it just refuses to come on but about 2 hours ago I managed to get it working for it to power off again. Do anyone have any other solutions we could try? if I manage to power it on, is there anything that can be done in verbose mode to diagnose this problem? More importantly have any other Mac users seen these problems? Any advice fellow edugeekers can provide would be most appreciated