TheRobins

There was a previous post pointing to HDD firmware, HDD is seeming more likely to be the cause. I wonder what level of RAID it is running. I had a similar issue years ago on a Raid 5 system, and remove each member drive one at a time until the server became stable, of course that pointed to the drive being the culprit. How old is the server?

I wont

Thanks the sad thing, with Acer not publicly supporting it you can get through 10 - 15 adapters before finding one that actually work. Ill give clonezilla a buzz and see how we get on.

Thanks All, I was blissfully un-aware for Clonezilla, Looks fantastic and its free, and for this small batch it will be perfect. Sadly just started the windows image restore now which is going to take another 4 hours, once that has finished I will re-capture using clonezilla.

Morning, I'm sure other people have had to do the same as me regarding imaging tablets with no Ethernet capabilities. I have 30 Acer windows 8 tablets which the previous technician just added the acer images straight onto the network. They are a mess, most of them have broken windows update so I am going to re-image with 8.1. As a test I have tried the built in windows backup solution which quite nicely produces a VHD for my use, Its a painfully slow task but one by one you could have them replicate the image and the sysprep'd ready for deployment. Some reason it has been the slowest backup I have ever seen. The image took 6 1/2 hours to write @ 15GB and restoring test was not much quicker. With there only being 1 USB port on the docking station, I have had to use a USB Powered hub in order to add the USB portable drive, keyboard mouse and USB DVD Drive. So in all, are there any other ways people have managed to re-image these devices. Looking at the firmware for the Iconia W510 they do not support USB Ethernet for boot or Boot from LAN so seems that route is out of the question?

Excellent feedback thanks people. I feel for mrnoisy, that must be so frustrating. I'm sure if setup correctly Meru will work extremely well in most environments. Sometimes you have to question how these "resellers" get contracts with the likes of Meru. Surely, as seen here their products word of mouth rating can sometimes hit 0 In certain circles because of bad setup and installation. Reading a couple of Post of some of the business IT forums quite a few post have summarised over all the features, its the controller and software that makes Ruckus stand out for people like ourselves. We don't have to pile mountains of man hours into constant management, fault finding and tweaking VLANs to try and make it work. I'm quite looking forward to getting the finished quotes in this week which looks like its going to leave a big decision to make. Admittedly were are no where near the scale of some of you out there, but still we need to right equipment that's going to do the job. With around 500 Pupils but currently 190 wireless classroom devices which is set to grow, the equipment is going to have some larger traffic at times with 1 or 2 small remote app's and some cloud based computing. Whilst I am also thankful for being given funding to upgrade our core and edge switching as well, as in its current state I am not sure the wireless would have a fair shot at being successful

I was interested in the Ruckus Video on AC, Bill Kish on 802.11ac | Ruckus Wireless, Inc. I'm sure I'm not miss reading his message, he doesn't seem very excited and seems to suggest its for high density areas such as conference rooms and stadia. No mention of education at all. Im not sold on AC to be honest.

Have to agree that when we had our heat maps back from Meru they came back with 34APs and ruckus with 18, Sadly this heat mapping software is definitely worst case scenario.

How do you mean most of the time, Does it not always work?

Your position can be very frustrating, I have been there myself a few years ago. I'm not sure you need the highest level Microsoft certified bod in but just another pair of eyes and hands can make the world of difference. If staff are making enough noise, and say its causing them enough problems I am sure you can approach the business manager/head and request external support. Your issue could be warning signs of an imminent failure and the longer it is left the bigger the issues may be in the future. I suspect the DLINK switches may not be helping your cause but without the correct equipment or tools to do some more in depth tests you could end up going around in circles. Sadly doesn't look as if you are local else I would have offered to come over with some kit and spare switch and have a look, maybe there is someone local on here you may be able to give you a quick hand with it. Another little thought that just came to mind, How many NIC's does your server have? If you have more than one are they both being used?

You are right and I feel its going to come down to price. However I don't really agree with the "unmanaged" solution. The current system is un-managed and is a nightmare. I have only been here for a short while and also am on my own so my time is very thin on the ground. Also with the layout of the building, certain access points currently can be seen by 5 - 6 others, so with using 40MHZ bandwitdh, you are going to suffer with heterodyne and interference. Then when you start looking at 3 ssid's and VLAN management it would become a handful to manage.

Very very good, I like the format, If only I had the time to do such a test I would try it. Although 5 years old that report is probably still a true representation of current standards

Very interesting points all of which I have thought about. From what I can gather, As Soon as I have spoken to anyone competing against Meru they pipe up straight away and say about the controller traffic "issue" word of which I use very lightly. Anyway, You are right what is the chance of you using all 2GB at any one time. I have around 190 devices which will not all be on at the same time and I could envisage another 100 other "guest or BYOD" devices. But, if you think about it I personally use WSUS, and a few remote apps. Class switches on 10 laptops, 200MB of WSUS updates just pushed out, sophos updates, and other things which happen such as printer drivers. Add say another 40 devices across the school doing the same thing and suddenly that 2GB could become saturated. I have 10Gb connectivity to servers as well. Meru now offer a virtual controller which could sit on our servers 10GB connections, however I do not have VMWARE or any VM's as I am rebuilding a whole network, and they only support VMWare. However their seamless AP transition is something that really interests me personally. However looking at a few responses so far and the threads I have been looking through on here, Ruckus seems to work out of the box and ceases most wireless related support calls and they seem to be able to cover areas with less AP's Meru seem to be leading with AC at the moment, but do I really envisage AC being 100% necessary in 3 years, No but i'm sure we all said that when Draft N came in. Have the Ruckus pricing in just waiting for the Meru pricing, I can see it all coming down to cost. At the end of the day I'm sure both systems would work well else they wouldnt be a big in schools as they are now. Thanks all for the replies.

Thanks Both I have heard both to be honest. There is an "issue" with Meru which all ruckus re-sellers seem to push, that all traffic has to pass through the controller. I personally think for me it will come down to price, however the active antenna's in the Ruckus gear seems very smart technology, similarly the single AP design of Meru has massive benefits.

Ok been reading this thread with interest, what sticks in my mind is the fact you can tie it down to a Monday at 1.20, that doesn't say traffic/hardware failure to me. Now I am going back a long long time now, I used to have the netgear DG834 home modem/router. There was a large bug within it where by once a week at a random time it would request a NTP time update from the internet. At the time I was using OpenDNS which for some reason block access to the netgear NTP server, once a week at the same time our internet would drop out and re-connect. Of course this isn't the issue here but I would be interesting to see the following info Switch make and model In event viewer do you have any tasks scheduled for that time, some SIMS plugins that request data look in at that time Do you have any "odd" devices on your network, I have seen all sorts from boiler management systems, door entry systems and the like. Have you also get a spare pc you could use, Place it on the network. Join the domain, create a share, and then map it to a pc in the school. When your shares from the main servers die, see if your spare pc's share is still open. If it is, you could basically pin point it to the server.

Hi All Just looking for some views/general opinions. I am in the final stages of decided between the 2 following wireless systems. Meru AC Wireless, 20 AP's, Physical Controller (no VMware for virtual controller) Or Ruckus System, 18APS, Physical Controller. B/G/N. Of course we have to decide between Going for N or AC. At the moment we have no AC compatible devices, only a medium sized schools and there are no plans for BYOD. If you are running any of these systems I wonder if you have come across any issues or concerns Thanks.

Interesting Script EJWill. I have just tried it myself. What doesn't seem to work is the force duplex option, it doesn't matter which drop down I select it will always default to simplex. I am just playing and testing some scripts at the moment and found yours to be very good, and not over the top. Maybe its down to the new version

All Printers have gone. I am now using Print Deployment in Server2008R2 which is working fine, its just the old remaining printers. I am going to try and log-off script to remove all printers and with GPO deployment it will sort itself out soon I hope.

Morning all I am dealing with a school who have a messed up AD and printer solution. Managed to get that sorted, I'm just wondering if there is a script to remove "dead" printers. I know I can remove printers is I know the name and server they were shared from, however this is in such a state that some users have 15 old printer connections that have been removed. I was almost tempted to run along the lines of "server1/*.*" "server2/*.*" but not sure with printers whether that would work or what mayhem may start, Any Tips/Pointers would be most welcome Below is the SpiceWorks script I have used for a couple of years. 'Begin Script 'Remember to edit the printer address variables of strPrinter1 and strPrinter2 as well as the strComputer field strComputer = "." strPrinter1 = "\\server\Printer1" strPrinter2 = "\\server\Copier1" Set objWMI = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2") Set colPrinters = objWMI.ExecQuery("Select * From Win32_Printer") For Each objPrinter in colPrinters on error resume next If Lcase(objPrinter.name) = Lcase(strPrinter1) Then Set objNetwork = CreateObject("Wscript.Network") objNetwork.RemovePrinterConnection strPrinter1 Else If Lcase(objPrinter.name) = Lcase(strPrinter2) Then Set objNetwork = CreateObject("Wscript.Network") objNetwork.RemovePrinterConnection strPrinter2 End If End If Next 'End Script

In my old Job before I left I had just implemented 2Simple on iPads (special needs environment) It was largely successful by the time I had left, It was only limited by the IOS restrictions on images really. Staff were happy with it, we were migrating away from eProfile, which actually worked very well. Im not sure why they didn't want it.

All updates have been done. Just downloading the ISO from VLSC, our 10Mb link isn't enjoying that. AV is Sophos, I did disable scanning and even tried with it removed to no avail.

Thanks both. I would have thought M$ would have picked up on that by now. Downloading now thankfully so I can install SQL Server 2008R2

Hi All Having a look at one of the servers running here which doesn't do much apart from share pupil profiles, its massively excessive and until I re-build the network over the summer I am looking to use it as a papercut/print server. However it seems to refuse to process server 2008r2 service pack one. All other update run fine, and there seems to be no other issues with the server. I did try M$'s MicrosoftFixit.wu.LB.11831691848013757.1.1.Run which always finds and issue, re-sets it however SP1 always fails to install. Any pointers on where to start with this one. Thanks

Thanks for all the responses Actually had the Van out showing the latest model. I must admit I was impressed. Yes as you say there is some bleed through, but I quite honestly thought for worksheets, mock exams and letters home it would be more than adequate. I am looking at weighing up the higher rental costs of lower click costs. Personally if I mix it with toner based MFD's I could have the best of both worlds. Lets see what the pricing looks like

Morning All I am in the final stages of sorting out our managed print contract. I have the fail - safe options of the ESPO-GPS government contracts but RISO have come in a and mixed the jar a bit. I have done some research into their devices, whilst the 125 PPM sounds impressive I have heard that the quality sometimes leaves something to be desired. I just wondering some anyone have any opinions on this, Is it extremely noticeable or is it hardly noticeable and the cost outweighs the slightly lower quality Be great to hear some feedback Thanks Dan