nielpeel

Update - I added the extra drive as a hot spare and ran a surface check from the intel storage console, but the drive failed this test spectacularly!! (that's eBay for ya). So it looks like I'll be going down the route of tearing down the array and recreating it, then restoring the server from backup. If we have some cash in the budget, it might be the right time to upgrade the disks to 146gb each, so we can give pupils more than 100 mb home folders!

I normally test my tape backups by restoring a few random folders of data to a single folder on the server - is there a better way to test the integrity of the backups? NTbackup is used here, verify is on.

Hi SYNACK! I've been unable to find an option to repair the parity data of the array. It's an Intel SRCZCR controller. Maybe I should check in the Intel RAID BIOS, which I can do tomorrow if I can restart the server. Unfortunately the Intel documentation is not very good on RAID parity checking and recovery... I'd like to try and replace the suspected bad drive but I'm sure it will fail to rebuild - any ideas what would happen at that point (apart from total disaster, heh-heh). I could add the spare drive as a hot drive as you suggest and try and force a failover but it's just the worry of not knowing what will happen that stops me from doing this at the moment. Last resort is your final option, I have good tape backups, and I would be confident in performing this task, I would just have to persuade the rest of the team of this!! If not, then I guess we just leave the server alone until it does actually fail, or it gets replaced! However I am determined to have both servers as failure-proof as possible, so I will try my best.

Hi, I was hoping for some advice & clarification on the RAID 5 arrays in our two servers. One server had a failed drive in it's RAID 5 array (3 x SCSI U320 drives), it ran OK on remaining two drives and I managed to source a replacement drive to rebuild the array without a hitch, parity verify now completes with no errors (the network manager had knowingly left this failed drive in the array for over two years and never done anything about it ). I am hoping this server is sorted now. The other server doesn't have a clear-cut drive issue - just before Xmas I ran a parity check on the RAID 5 array and it failed after 5 minutes. I checked the status of the drives in Intel Storage Console, one of the drives has 6 Grown errors, I fear there may well be an issue with this disk.... I have a spare hard disk for this server but am I right in thinking that if I replace the suspected bad disk, the array will not rebuild properly because of the parity check failure?

Thanks very much for all of that info! We had considered that Cat5 would be the way to go in terms of carrying the data, I hadn't actually considered the idea of a reverse feed, however, so I'll go back on Monday and ask a few more questions about exactly what is required. Thanks again.

Good afternoon, our school is getting too small for the amount of kids on role, which means that assemblies have become a very tight squeeze in the main hall. To that end, an extension is being built to house two new classrooms (upstairs) and a reasonably sized assembly hall downstairs. The new hall will house the overflow from the main hall during assemblies, and we're thinking of a solution that could stream live video and audio from the main hall, to the new hall. So far we have decided on two cameras, at different angles, in the main hall, with some sort of audio capture - the resulting output would be projected onto a big screen in the new hall - we would like to switch between the two camera views on the fly, like a TV show producer might! Just wondered if anybody is doing this already, or had any suggestions on how it could be done, and a suitable company that could do the work?

Excellent description of a scenario that us ICT techs face on a daily basis! Usually I am alerted to a problem via a chinese-whisper-type message that is relayed to me via a student (or two students, why does it take two students to tell me one message?) that has lost all detail and purpose by the time it reaches me... So then you have to walk into the classroom and all eyes are on you, perhaps the lesson has halted altogether because of said technical hitch, the students jeer/cheer, the teacher looks relieved/frustrated - basically you are on the spot, and I love it, because usually the issue is solved with a simple plugging in of an errant cable or a few deft clicks of the mouse! I wouldn't change my job for the world, though (only for a better one, like network manager).

Ah now I see, couldn't quite figure out how the whole thing fitted into Joomla - thanks!!!!

Thanks for this useful thread - I have installed the Phoca Download component - how would I now link an image in article, for example, to a newsletter that I uploaded to my website with phoca? Thanks in advance...

Hi there, our Finance Manager has asked if it is possible for me to automatically force FMS users to change their password every half-term, or approximately 60 days (I guess like a password policy in AD). At the moment they change their passwords manually but he would like to be able to guarantee that this happens for all staff regularly, and write this in his security policy. Is this possible? Thanks in advance!

Hi, I need to buy some colour lasers to replace our 4 year old Konica Minolta workhorses which have been very busy, yet reliable, in our main ICT rooms. Most of the printers were in place when I started my job here a year ago, but I have bought some Samsung mono lasers in for the admin office. I took the opportunity at BETT this Friday to scope out the latest printers, and some guy told me "no-one ever got fired for buying HP" - an American sentiment, methinks. I'd like to stick with Samsung for our mono lasers because they are fast, reliable and cheap to run. However, I'm undecided about the colour laser options; can anybody recommend a robust and economical colour laser printer? Our Konicas have been great yet apparently (according to info gleaned from BETT) 95% of schools run HP, there must be a reason for this! Thanks in advance for your opinions.

I've been struggling recently with the best way to configure new staff laptops - previously teaching staff had vanilla XP laptops with their own administrator-level account. We've bought in a load of new laptops which we've decided to set up as CC3 Shared Laptop workstation type, each teacher being a Privileged User type on their own machine. This way it's easy to assign application packages to teachers, plus they can easily use SIMS to acces student data. It has been difficult to familiarise teachers with RM Synchronise however, which has led to me configuring most of the laptops to operate in offline mode (partly because we don't have enough space on our curriculum servers for all of the teacher's home folders - they like to load on entire CDs and DVDs worth of resources). Now I'm finding that I'm having to configure a custom workstation type to allow Windows features such as Autoplay and Medi Player Full Mode - in the end we might as well have kept them on standard XP installs, I'm sure!

I took this course in February - I was new to RM networks in December 2007 and so this course helped to reinforce the day-to-day stuff I had picked up. If you get a good trainer then the tips/tricks/shortcuts/advice from this course will prove invaluable and make you much more proficient on an RM CC3 network. The 30-minute test at the end is worth doing, a pass is practically guaranteed at the 60% pass mark! Overall I'm glad I did the course, although I think a total novice to CC3 and Active Directory might struggle a bit, there's a lot of information to take in.