ranj

We just recently purchased an adaptec snap server 520 (2tb) and I would highly recommend. It is much more expensive than your buffalo terra stations but is designed to be a high performance file server. Very simple to setup as well. Can talk with a variety of languages, windows, unix, apple talk etc

primopdf is a good one

do they do firewire external drives?

Hi Does anyone know if there are 250gb or above external drives which dont require external power. I conciscious that we are running out of power sockets and I would rather get some external drives which power via USB. are these available? thanks

Hi The pupils have another game they are now playing. Pupils have a shared area where they can save work for teachers. so teachers can collect this from one location. The problem we have though is pupils can changed the hidden attribute as shown, which then hides the selected folder. Is there a way which I can disable pupils from doing this? Your help is apprecaited

do you know if you can run net runna or ghost equivalent tools on MAC's. i was under the impression, this wasn't possible.

Hi we in the process of looking at a new suite. As we are a performing arts college, the school are contemplating whether to go with 30 apple MACs. I am trying my best to encourage the school to look at a windows solution due to the fact the school I feel will suffer as we dont have a technician who has knowledge of Macs. We of course could get trained but as you know in any school time is not on our side and teacher will expect us to know everything, which just isnt going to be possible whilst managing another 300 windows clients. I have done a quick survey to find out why the arts department want macs, and its for these reasons: Adobe photoshop. (which we already use on a windows environment) cubase( already use this on a windows network) garage band (music creation software) i movie( apples version of movie maker which is appartly much more stable) Now personally I dont see why we need macs because the majority of that software is avaialbe for windows clients and I know from the budget i have been given to do this, I could buy some amazing top spec windows PC's which i hope will resolve the slowness issue which as you can see from what we want to use is an issue if we dont have decent spec machines. I can see the apple mac equivalent to being about £700. imagine what sort of windows machine i could buy for that. So back to the main issue. The only justification I have seen to go for macs is the main reason why it will be used which is for music creation software, the apple version which is garage band is very similar, industry standard piece of software which is much simpler than cubase. the school aim to teach garage band at years 7, 8 and 9. What i would like to know is if there is an equivalent windows version of garage band which is also industry standard. the CLC's and other performing arts school all seem to be going to the MAC route. I really feel there must be a windows version of this. can anyone help. Our existing music suite as M audio sound cards and I have seen this package on their site which is basically garage band for windows BUT its only available in america. http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Session-main.html if anyone uses an equivalent version for windows. It would be greatly appreciated. thanks

I made a decision in buying effectively 2 nas boxes in the end. I brought an Adaptec snap server 520 2tb which will backup all data everynight and on the other side of the school i going to have a similar setup which will effectively allow me to have 2 copies of data so in the unlikely event of a fire to the server room, we might be ok. Our school is fairly big. What i liked about this sort of solution is like craig mentioned. backup tapes can be prone to fail, and with such important data now on a school network I cannot afford to take that risk and it will also save me doing a daily check of backups. Now i will be able to just check quickly through a drive mapped on my computer to see if the backup was successfully completed and it mean instant restores because the files will be there uncompressed and no indexing and sorting. we see how it goes. If i get problems, i communicate them on here.

Hi Looking to purchase a better version of movie making software. Currently our school uses Windows Movie maker to compile Video presentation. We looking for a more stable version which we can purchase but also needs to be able to 1)the final movie to be able to insert into powerpoint 2)import clips form Real player or Quicktime 3)be able to drag and drop audio files into clip. (.e.g mp3, wav) Overall we looking for somethings which would excite our staff and students. I dont want to something thats overcomplicated. We currently use photoshop in certain areas which the students have picked up fairly well. The reason for looking at Premiere which because it is an Adobe product, but I am open to other suggestions. Also can anyone recommend a supplier where I am able to get 50+ licences at a good price. I looked at Pugh and Ramesys but again open to suggestions. Thanks

prism cabinets. I think we paid £500 for 47u ones. Can be a mission to build from what i have been told

defo a compression problem, had the same problem with sony ait-3 drives. 50gb native and 130 compressed. after about 55gb it would ask for another tape.

Hi folks, its Monday morning and heres the thing Came in today to find our backup server has had another hard drive failure, (4 hard drive failures since I have been here)and I am fed up with fixing it all the time, it is an old server, so i went to head and he has authorised for me to buy another backup system. I have about 5k to spend. Currently one of our servers has a tape drive which does our MIS data and we have a near side backup file server which just grabs the data of all the core servers and backups it up onto its 500gb raid 5 disks. I am looking at a solution, I dont want to go the tape route but I need to think about off site storage as well and my plan is to put a big NAS box, maybe 2tb on the other side of the school (our school is fairly big in size so if there was a fire in the server room its very unlikely that the otherside would be burnt down, i have told this to the head and he fine with that as well).We currently have networking to this other area as well. So my plan is to buy 2 storage servers. one I keep in the server room which is on one side of the school and the other server on the other side of the school. The one in the server room will grab the data of all servers everynight and then transfer that data to the other box on the otherside of the school using a dedicated link. its just over 100m and is cat5 and am aware of the distance issues, but i feel for backup purposes it will be fine, because it will be transferring the data from one server to another overnight and will only send data which has changed on that day but anyone feels that I am wrong in saying this, then I am open to suggestions. I like to ask other folks, what robust solutions they have in their enterprises and if they work well. I am looking for a solution which hopefully will last up to 5 years. If anyone feels that the way i am approching this is not the best way, feel free to say and suggest a better way. Thanks

new server all the way, if money is really tight then cautisuly look at upgrade.

apprantly I been looking into this deeper, and it seems to be a problem with Nforce cards on a AMD x2 64 3000+ processors.

Anyone used a company called http://www.digishow.tv for their digital signage, they seem like a good company. It be good to hear if anyone has used them, and if there were any problems.

Hi I was wondering if anyone has experienced this problem. Please see attachment. It doesnt matter what I ping or what ever workstation is used, we seems to be getting some unfamilar reponses when pings other workstations, servers etc. Has anyone had this problem. If so could any one point me in the direction of what it could be. I thought it might be a problem with DNS but everything seems to be happy on the DNS servers. a worrying error I am getting in event viewer though is "Windows cannot obtain the domain controller name for your computer network. (An unexpected network error occurred. ). Group Policy processing aborted." Error 1054. Any help would be appreciated.

Hi folks wondering if someone can provide me with some answers to a few questions I have on outlook web access. We have an exchange 2003 server and run outlook web access. we are encountering some problems with outlook web access and to resolve it, it seems we need to upgrade the service pack. Now we haven't installed the latest service pack for exchange for 2 reasons. 1) we dont have server 2003 latest service pack installed and was thinking if we install latest pack for exchange if may require the latest pack of server 2003 for it to work correctly. 2) if nothings broken dont attempt to do anything which could make it worse or introduce a new problem. The only problem is now I think we need to upgrade to the latest service pack on exchange because we are getting duplicate entries on outlook for a particular user who sync with a PDA and a way to resolve i have read is to upgrade the service pack. What I would like to know is I have noticed there is some software which can be brought which can remove duplicate entries. Does anyone know if there is some freeware software available to do this, also if anyone has done the latest service pack on exchange and encountered any problems, is there any tips anyone can give me before i do this step your advice is appreciated

Yes we have SQL, Facility and eportal on one server. We did move eportal to another server to see if that would address issues, but it didnt.

Hi I was wondering if anyone can advise on the problems my school is facing We have had facility and Eportal from Serco for about 3 years and have had nothing but problems. Facility works fine most of the time but with eportal we find it is very unresponsive and very slow. We have spent a considerable amount on our backbone network putting in cat6 truenet gigabit, the server we have for our MIS is a dedicated HP proliant server which runs Server 2003. It a single xeon processor with 3.5gb ram. It seems that eportals struggles with many users on the system. On facility its fine but when a few are on eportal we suffer slow logons, hanging, and other related items to the slowness. The server usage is fine, it processor and memory are low. I would like to know if similar schools have these types of problems with their eportals and if their local lea or support has suggested any improvements, also if anyone has a good contact at Serco I would be most grateful. Please help this poor ranger.

Hi Just needed another opinion. We currently have Scavenging DNS records turned off, when we looked at it at the DNS, we had lots of duplicate records, and we found that the network can grind to a halt at times especially when everone logs in. One forum suggested maybe the DNS records are in a mess. Does anyone think it maybe worth giving DNS a clean, to see if it helps the matter, I noticed we have scavenging turned off, Can anyone tell me if there are benefits of having this turned on? Any help would be greatly appreciated

thanks for the advice, i am going to backup my important stuff and then i am going to go for it i have heard too much good stuff about vista, which is a change. I remember when XP came out and it was full of bugs. Playing with it, i been impressed with it, maybe because it looks so good. i post my verdict on how it went.

Hi Does anyone know if its possible to dua boot vista and xp. I hearing things like Vista has to be on a primary partition. Is this tru. Has anyone had any success installing multiple os with Vista It be good to hear some stories.

is there any good articles about dual booting vista with another OS.

My worst experience with HP has been with the support. Sales team is in the UK and is all hunky dory, when there is a problem thats when you are in trouble. I am indian, and if even i cant understand the guys in India. I was basically given some wrong advice about HP care packs, we have a proliant ml370 and its care pack had expired, i spoke to someone at HP in sales and said "can I extend my care pack for another 3 years", he replied yes that can be done. I send you a quote over and we can get this sorted. Once we recieved them and registered them, the expiry date didnt extend, so I phoned up HP and they said "you cannot extend your carepack for 3 years, only a 1 year post warranty care pack will do". So I was sold something which even on the HP website didnt even state and was not happy. So in the end we wrote a letter to Stephen Gill (MD of HP UK) and got a reply from his PA and from then on we eventually got our money back. My advice is if you get a problem with HP or any other company for that matter, write a letter to the MD.

Hi Was wondering if this scenario is possible We have got a email address which we use called pastoral@queensbridge etc which doesn't give the identity of which persons email address it is, any emails that go to this account then get forwarded to this individuals email account. What we want to do is for this individual to reply back to a sender which will be a parent but doesnt identify their username email address, instead we would like it to go from the pastoral email. We use web outlook. I know this is possible if we use ordinary outlook. Could this be done. Is it a setting which i need to adjust on server manager on my exchange server. Any help would be greatly appreciated