ranj

Hi We are moving all of our admin staff over to Office 2010 and am going to spend an hour with them to outline some of the benefits. Is anyone able to give me real good selling points that will get staff wowed in the session I do with them. I want them to really go away and be excited! I dont really use Office but do use Outlook 2010 and have enough on there to sell it to existing outlook 2003 users but am more interested in key selling features in Word and Excel. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Hi We currently deploy Windows 7 using an unattend.xml and the mechanism is using WDS on a 2008 r2 server. We currently have deployed it to about 10% of our machines. The next big one will be to deploy on mass to 170 machines over a weekend. In preparation to this I have a few questions. currently we use WDS to rollout the 7 image and it works very well on a small scale. We have a number of different machines comprising of laptops and desktops, I am finding that all the correct drivers are not being picked up once the image has been loaded onto the client. An example is the graphics card is not working on 1 particular machine unless I manually install this using the CD after it has loaded win7. I am aware that using WDS I can integrate all of our drivers for all builds of machines (e.g. NIC card, graphics, sound drivers etc) and WDS will decide which driver goes for which build. I would like to do this but am struggling to get it working. I was wondering if others had similar issues like mine? Are there any weblinks for documentation which will allow me to do this? I am also looking at installing System Center R3 for us to do zero touch deployment of Windows 7 with the ability to schedule the installation of Windows 7 over a weekend. We will be overseeing this but it would be great if we could leave it running overnight and come in the next day to do checks and fill in computer names etc. I would like to do this in a way that involves less intervention from us on the client end if possible. Currently using the unattend.xml we only need to enter a computer name. I plan to also install System Center on the same server as our WDS and MDT server which is 2008 R2 in a VMware cluster. Is this ideal or would I be better using a separate server just for sccm? I can create another server if this is necessary but thought I would ask for a second opinion. I am also been reading and am aware I will need to do some schema changes to the AD infrastructure. If anyone has guidance or web links on how best to do this that would be greatly appreciated. Our plan is to rollout Windows 7 to 170 machines over a weekend. I am interested in also know how much load this would be on the WDS/MDT server. We have setup WDS with multicasting in mind. Has anyone tried rolling out Windows 7 on lots of machines all at once. Does Multicasting manage the process successfully, reason I ask is it is my intention to install windows 7 on as many machines around the building, leave the process going overnight and come back the next day to check on progress, hoping that all machines have the correct WDS image and is ready to roll. Any advice on all/some of these questions would be most appreciated. Thanks

Hi I have read a number of threads on various Forums and don't understand why I can't replicate 3 shares we have within a DFS on a 2003 R2 server which is NOT a DC and move these onto a 2008 R2 member server so I can decomission the 2003 server. We use DFS mainly to host software packages and also as a repository area for all of our MSI's which are deployed across the clients in our organisation. Currently these are on a 2003 R2 Enterprise server running SP2. We only have the 1 DFS server but now I want to decomission this server and move these shares onto a 2008 R2 server also running enterprise. On the new server I installed the file services role as well as the DFS management tool. I clicked on add namespaces to display and it showed me available names space for the domain which was domainname.pri\dfs and this is the one which is located on the 2003 server. So I added this in and now its available in the list. Within here I could see the 3 shares which we have on DFS. I noticed that at the top it said 'Domain based in Windows 2000 Server mode'. I wasn't sure if this was related to domain functional level in AD and was confused because our domain functional level is set to 2008 and forest functional level is set to 2003. I tried to create the exact folder shares that I had on the 2003 server, onto the 2008 server with the exact share and security permissions also and I added this new 2008 server as a Namespace server which it seemed to do successfully. If I click on open in explorer, it correctly shows the 3 shares and so I know its linking back to the 2003 server. What I wanted to do is replicate the folders on the 2003 server to the 2008 server. Once all shares are on the 2008 server, I wanted to remove the old 2003 namespace server from DFS management and then decomission it but it just doesnt seem to work. If I try to create an additional folder target for a share for the new server, it asks me to create a replication group but when I do this I get the error message that the DFS replication service is not installed. I have checked the DFS replication service and it is running I only have DC's running 2008 and AD is running in 2008 domain functional level mode. Does anyone know why I am not able to replicate because my understanding was that 2003 r2 was able to support dfs-r and replication should work or have I not understood this properly. Others in other threads are saying that I should use the file server migraton toolkit and move the folder with permissions over to the 2008 server and then remove the links and this should work also but I was hoping I could add the new 2008 server and get DFS to replicate it to the 2008 server and then remove the targets from old server and decomission it. Maybe I haven't understood this correctly but that what I thought DFS does well at and replicate folders across multiple servers? If anyone can advise it would be most appreciated. Thanks

All about the simpsons!

Right I managed to find a solution for this. For some reason all the files the kids had worked on in that folder had gone into a hidden state which would make sense why I could see them in terminal and not in finder. I found an article which showed me how to create an automator script. I ran this and was able to see the files on my destination device and on the external hard drive that I had put the files on. The article can be found here: Quick Tip: Show/Hide Hidden Files: Apple « Very odd how the files have been represented as a hidden state.

Hi I have a bit of a serious problem which I am hoping someone can help me with or someone may have experience this before and have a fix for it. We used Carbon Copy cloner to do backup of the whole of our XRAID. As this is just a replication of what is actually on the live server it seems to have created the folder structure but when I try to look at the contents of a folder which on the live server has files on there and on the backup destination there are no files and if I use finder to navigate through the menu it is empty. if I do a get info on the folder, it says the folder is about 300mb odd for 0 items. However if I use terminal to view the contents of the files using the ls command it gives me a result and shows me all the correct files that should be there. If I use the open command it opens the files successfully. At the moment I have found if I open the file, save it as a different file name on a different area e.g. desktop the file will open and I have no issues. Does anyone know what could have happened here, is there anyway for me to resolve on MASS? I am really struggling to understand what is going on here. The files we are accessing are from an archive and they were deleted on the live server to preserve space. As there are a files I need to restore now to do my method will take me a long time. If anyone could assist me with this it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you

To all your VMWare Admins out there. VMware have just announced a mobile app and basically gives you the ability to do the following: * Search the VMware Knowledgebase * Read the Support Insider blog for important updates to your infrastructure * Catch the VMware twitter feed * Watch VMware TV (how-to videos) You can install from here: VMware KB Mobile Web App — Widgetbox VMware Support Insider: Introducing the new VMware KB Mobile App

Is anyone able to advise me on this? I am really struggling on how to resolve this. We did a transition from Exchange 2003 to 2007 back in August 2009 and whilst 99% of our users use OWA2007, users were able to see the global address list but recently and since we have upgraded to office 2010 some of our users who want to use the Outlook 2010 client are not able to see the address list. These clients have been setup with cached mode enabled btw. In fact it seems that no OAB exists on the server. On the Exchange server under program files, Exchange server, clientAccess, OAB. The folder is there but the contents are empty. We have tested, if we turn off Cached mode on the client, the address book works because obviouslly its not using the OAB anymore and more likely the GAL. When we look on the Exchange Server we have the following logs: OALGen failed to read the objectGuid attribute from offline address book (OAB) object '/o=************/cn=addrlists/cn=oabs/cn=Default Offline Address Book' in Active Direcotry. Please check security settings on this object. OAB generation will not be performed. OALGen encountered error ffffffff while initializing the offline address list generation process. No offline address lists have been generated. Please check the event log for more information. - /o=**********/cn=addrlists/cn=oabs/cn=Default Offline Address Book All I want to do is recreate the folders in the OAB because I think that will resolve the issue. I have had a look at our our AD and that is fine. We have 2 X 2008 Domain controllers and I have ran DCDIAG and it has passed all tests. Has anyone seen this? Can anyone help? I am sure the problem must have come from when we did the transition from Exchange 2003 to 2007. Thank you

Just came across this thread, I am really suprised no one uses Nero anymore. I thought it was just me who never used it because it was a resource hog but interesting to know lots of alternatives and free ones out there. I use CD Burner XP personally which I think is great. Had a problem recently getting it to work with a particlar DVD drive. When trying to erase, burn audio or burn a standard image, the drive was detected fine but when I tried to create a data disk I found the drive wasn't recognised and found I needed to install intel matrix manager for it to work, since installation it is now resolved but was about to give up and look for an alterative. Glad I managed to find a fix for it, hopefully it may be useful for anyone else having similar issues.

Thanks for the reply's. When I remove the old flexible adapter, is there any point me using the same MAC address on the new VMXNet3 Card or am I best letting the new NIC use a different MAC address? Thanks

Hi I was wondering if someone had any advice with an issue I are having with backups of 2files servers running as Virtual Machines. Both machines are VM’s in the ESX4 cluster and are configured as follows: 2003 server - 4 vCPU's and 4gb RAM, it is a 32bit server with the flexible network card in VMware. 2008 server 1vCPU 64bit server with 3gb RAM with the E1000 network card in VMware. 1 file server is a Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise server which has approx 450gb of data and the other file server is a Windows 2003 R2 Enterprise Server which has approx 450gb of data. To do a full backup on the 2008 server it takes a reasonable time of 9 hours but the 2003 server is taking nearly 19 hours do backup the same amount of data. When I look at the logs on the backup server to measure the throughput it is vastly different. It is reported that the 2008 has a throughput of approx 51000.000 MB/Hour but the 2003 server only has a throughput of 23000.000 mb/hour. I thought it could be something like the antivirus running at the same time as the backup. It was indeed running but since I have disabled this it hasn't made a difference in terms of the throughput. I have read that it could be the network configuration on the VMware machines. The 2008 server is using the E1000 adapter which I hear provides much better performance than the flexible adapter. the 2003 has the flexible adapter,this server was originally done as a P2V migration and I think by default VMware gives the flexible adapter as the most compatible adapter for a VM. I was thinking of changing the adapter on this slow server from a flexible one to either the E1000 or one of the VMXNet adapter. Are there any thoughts on this. I hear if i use the VMXNET3 adapter it simulates a 10gbps adapter in the VM even though we may only have a 1GBPS adapter. Has anyone seen any issues with this? I hear that this adapter will provide the best throughput and is compatible with the 2003 R2 Enterprise server I am running. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Hi I have decided to turn HA availability on our ESX4 3 host cluster. All Hosts are running ESX 4.0.0 294855 and all are identical hardware with same amount of CPU, memory etc. The first 2 hosts successfully are now part of the HA but the 3rd host attempts to configure HA and then comes up with an error: "cmd addnode failed for primary node: internal AAM error - agent could not start: unknown HA error" It seems like it has to install a HA agent on each host but for some reason it doesnt want to install on the last host. Does anyone know why I might be getting this error. Only today did we patch this host up to be the same version as the rest. I have been doing this gradually over the last few days. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

I'm not sure if you can get an option where it asks the students if they want to print in bw or colour but I would seriously recommend that you look at papercut to manage your printing costs. Its brilliant and actually they released a new version of it today which includes support for additional lDAP directories. You can set so many policies with it, you may be able to do what you want, I am not sure would have to check.

As you have just started I think your in the best position to ask SMT and get a decent budget to get the ball rolling as you can say the network is a mess and certain areas need to be looked at as a PRIORITY. Emphasise this fact and ensure the SMT or your boss get on board quickly. If lots of people have complained to you about the network this provides extra ammunition for your case.

Just Heard that Sony have announced that Gran Turismo 5 won't be ready for November. Gran Turismo 5 delayed again | Technology | guardian.co.uk Thats a huge disappointment, its one of the reasons why I brought a PS3. Anyone else disappointed?

I believe Xmarks will continue on. Its not signed and sealed yet but apparantly its not going anywhere now. If you look on the xmarks website there doesnt seem to be any sign of the press release that was on there saying they were going to bring it down. Xmarks | Bookmark Sync and Search Xmarks Blog » Xmarks Victory for the Users, by the Users

Schools which are on Schools Agreements I heard Microsoft DPM 2010 is really cheap. I am looking at this as an alternative to the backup system which we are using which is really difficult to sort and manage but we do have Linux/Apple Servers. We have 3 VMware ESX Hosts running 11 Windows Server 2003,2008,2008 R2 servers and 2 Ubuntu Servers 8.04. We have 1 physical DC, 1 Exchange 2007 enterprise VM, 1 SQL Server VM, 2 Windows File Servers (1 2003 and 1 2008R2). It sounds like DPM will be a bargain! Apparantly its £55 for server license and £5 per client for each server which needs a DPM client. Surely this can't be right, can someone can confirm that I am not going crazy!! Thanks

Hi Hopefully this is an easy question for all you VMware admins. I am running a 3 host esx4 cluster and very soon I want to look at patching these hosts up to a later level as I am having a few issues with our 2008R2 VM's and I think its because we are on our hosts the version which has 2008 R2 in is classed as experimental mode. 1 Host is running 175625 and the other 2 are running 164006 and want to get them all onto ESX4U2 (basically the one that before the latest one which doesnt require a 64bit vCenter server (we are running vcenter on a 32bit server and need to wait a while till we can order a newer server). What is the best way to patch these hosts up? I was thinking of moving all VM's to 2 hosts, patch 1 host fully, reboot the host once its upgraded and then move all VM's onto the host just patched and then do the other one and so on. Is it worth waiting a while between upgrading each host or can this be done one after the other just moving VM's from one host to another? All servers are identical and are HP DL380G5 with all of them having 32gb RAM. We have enough capacity to run all VM's on 2 servers if one went down for maintenance or other. Our vcenter server as the update module installed, am I right in saying I can just roll the rollup package for esx4.0u2 onto each host through the update module? Any advice will be most appreciated.

We are having a similar problem which I hope someone can help me with. We have WSUS installed on a server 2003 R2 Standard edition VM. I recently checked the server and noticed that the server cannot some of our clients but the clients are getting the majority of updates. Does anyone know how we can get our WSUS server talking to the clients again so I have a more accurate picture of what needs updating on the client end. I found on edugeek someone having a similar problem but doesnt seem to have worked for me when I have rolled it out as a startup batch file. the script deletes some old records and reinitialises it back with a WSUS server. the script is as follows: @echo off Echo Save the batch file "AU_Clean_SID.cmd". This batch file will do the following: Echo 1. Stops the wuauserv service Echo 2. Deletes the AccountDomainSid registry key (if it exists) Echo 3. Deletes the PingID registry key (if it exists) Echo 4. Deletes the SusClientId registry key (if it exists) Echo 5. Restarts the wuauserv service Echo 6. Resets the Authorization Cookie Echo 7. More information on PatchAholic...The WSUS Blog! @echo on net stop wuauserv REG DELETE "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate" /v AccountDomainSid /f REG DELETE "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate" /v PingID /f REG DELETE "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate" /v SusClientId /f net start wuauserv wuauclt /resetauthorization /detectnow Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Oh I have heard good things for Retrospect on Windows. On MAC on the other hand its a disaster! From hearing views from others, version 6 for MAC was the best one, and its actually got worse with newer versions. I have not used the Windows version but have heard its pretty decent on Windows.

Hi All We currently use Retrospect 8 to backup our Mac student and staff areas, this is backed up from our AppleXRAID and the backup destinations are on 2 separate NAS boxes. I have never been a big fan of Retrospect since we purchased it, I did manage to get it working, did a test restore and it was working quite well but since the latter upgrades the software in my opinion has got worse, has caused issues on the server and to top it off I have been unable to do restore when I have needed to. I have now completely lost confidence in the software, and from looking at the Retrospect forums I have learned it has been brought out by different companies, originally with DANTZ, then sold to EMC and recently it was sold to ROXIO and from the dantz forums others users are having similar issues, not getting decent responses and eventually giving up on the software. So I wanted to get other peoples opinions on backup software for MAC. I need something reliable, I need to be able to do scheduled backups, with maybe a full backup once a week with incremental or differencials or even snapshotting data. At the moment I am not completly convinced with my backup strategy so am looking at options. I have been recommended the following, does anyone use these, if so would you recommend, have you successfully managed to restore data using these tools, are they fairly easy to pick up? The ones I am investigating to replace from Retrospect are: Prestore Backup Some GUI form of RSYNC BakBone Netvault I have used Tolis, superduper and Carbon copy cloner but require something a bit more intelligent and ideally something which uses better compression techniques. Alternatively I have heard replication software like Rsync might be a better option but I need to be able to go back to at least a month recovery. Any suggestions?

Yes I can confirm this works. Thanks!

Hi sorry I got a question about the SQL database which vcenter uses. We have an issue at the moment where from a client we were not able to login to the vcenter server, this was because the vcenter server service was going to a stopped state. VMware support told me it was because the database was growing in size and once we ran a backup it seemed to have resolved the problem. We are in a similar situation where we only have 3 hosts so dont need a full blown SQL server so have been using SQL express with management studio express. Through this I can do one off backups but it means I need to remember to do them. Is anyone else using SQL express with vcenter and able to do scheduled backups. I am not very good with backup scripts. Has anyone got one that I could borrow? The VMware guy said I could use Transact SQL to do scheduled backups??? He wasn't able to talk me through with this though. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

Most defintley we currently use ultraVNC for our windows xp and a few 7 clients. It was responsive and worked well with XP but having some issues with 7. Its slow to use and I find it a resource hog and we are having the ctrl+alt+del problem. I am really interested in looking at remote assistance as well. I just tried it from my machine to a colleagues windows 7 machine and had problems connecting. I check the firewall on colleagues machines and it was allowed and i also enabled remote assistance in my computer, remote. Still doesnt work, any suggestions? Command I have run is msra /offera and %windir%\system32\msra.exe /offerra. it says 'your offer to help could not be sent' Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Folks We got a bit of a weird problem going on over here. Just recently we have noticed that quite a few HP printers around school are automatically going to pause even though no one has instructed them to do so. Majority of these printers are going through a Windows 2008 server and the server is the printer server and these printers all have IP's from the network. We have 1 printer which isn't networked but instead is shared through a users PC and is in an office. Occasionally they were just go to pause and sometimes you click on resume it will be fine. We have 1 printer though which refuses to go out of the pause state. We have tried: Latest driver installed (universal HP driver August 2010) Remove the printer and reinstall the printer and it seems to be ok but then it pauses a bit later. Has anyone seen an issue similar to this? Thanks