BJG

Nono...keep back, keep back... :sick:

Gawd, hope I can avoid going down with anything this year...had some dreadful bronchitis Christmases in the past, and the guy I'm sharing an office with is coughing like a good 'un.

Get him. http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-h0qmwEOkyM4/T-s6v0jytiI/AAAAAAAAAPU/GexKntbly2k/s1600/Kennett.jpg

A number of complaints recently along the lines of "very slow today...applications hanging" etc. I'm not really sure where the bottleneck is, though I doubt the constant flood of updates issuing from Microsoft is helping any. Any suggestions for simple, cheap, essential tools for monitoring network or server usage...? And any tips for a low-impact approach to managing WSUS? Thanks!

We have a bunch of Stone System 258s from 2009 which I was just looking at to see if I could figure out why they tend to randomly reboot themselves. I just noticed they have a side fan with four-pins mounted on a three-pin power connector, and a number of them were incorrectly seated so they've evidently never worked...I needed to shift them one pin over to fix. If you have any of these you might want to take a look at the Hardware Monitoring section in the BIOS to see if they're working.

Excellent.

What cards have y'all got in your servers - 1GbE, 10GbE, fibre cards...?

Landed on the school playing field! An air ambulance. Felt a bit sorry for the kid - - but, a helicopter! w00t.

Carried.

One of our Windows 2008 Servers was set up with a 50GB C:\ drive (?) and has only a pitiful amount of free space. I'm wondering whether to convert to dynamic for resizing...any potential problems there...?

First time, completed in under 5 minutes.

Scored 0, rewarded with "You have perfect colour vision".

A bunch of HP printers have recently lost the plot when it comes to printing pages portrait or landscape. The other day I found one which was fine if you printed 1 copy from Word, but if you tried 2 copies, pages would come out alternate portrait and landscape. I thought this was an isolated glitch but apparently others are playing similar tricks. (We tend to use mainly HP Universal Print Driver which I'm not keen on but in most cases there doesn't seem to be a choice.)

Since following the instructions in this thread to try and get IE10 to find the right homepage, I've had loads of problems with computers losing the setting "Bypass proxy server for local addresses"...this box is getting cleared. We have Server 2008 R2 with IE10 installed. Any quick tips welcome!

Currently investigating a bunch of random Office 2010 fails that are being reported, and expecting more...most common symptom is Powerpoint bailing out as soon as you try and run it, but some people also reporting Word doing the same thing. Typical event log entry is: Faulting application name: POWERPNT.EXE, version: 14.0.4754.1000, time stamp: 0x4b967cf0 Faulting module name: KERNELBASE.dll, version: 6.1.7601.18015, time stamp: 0x50b83b16 Exception code: 0xe0000002 Fault offset: 0x0000812f Faulting process id: 0x354 Faulting application start time: 0x01ceb5093640031f Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\POWERPNT.EXE Faulting module path: C:\Windows\system32\KERNELBASE.dll Report Id: 7406bbb7-20fc-11e3-a8c2-b8ca3a9285dc Event IDs 1000 / 1001. I've found I can fix it by clearing out the profile, but no idea yet why this is occurring...most likely thing seems to be some new update the machines are picking up...? Just thought I'd throw it out here in case anyone has seen it...

Can I do something with Group Policy? Bit of a pain to hack every PC...

Thanks, but, can I stop them seeing it? (Some idiot was trying to save stuff in it.)

Seem to remember seeing something similar. Try running this Microsoft Fixit on one of the affected machines and see if it helps... On a Windows Vista-based or Windows 7-based client computer, you can still access offline files even though the file server is removed from the network *edit* (You might also have to delete existing non-working local profiles.)

This is probably 101 stuff but I've only just noticed it. If a student opens a folder and then clicks "Desktop" in the left-hand pane, they can see a folder which has their username and is identified as "System Folder". If they open that they can reach folders under: c:\Users\%username%\... Huh? This username/folder doesn't appear on the desktop and system folders are hidden...

*edit* Very possibly. Spent a bit more time on it, but it was generally being a PITA so I ended up bypassing the print server and just adding it on a TCP/IP port on each machine. Seems to be working now, so that should see things through to the end of term anyway. Thanks for your input folks.

This is a fairly basic problem, but I'm posting here as I'm hoping to find a quick fix. In one of the IT Rooms the PCs kept randomly dropping the printer I'd deployed via group policy, and in the end I installed it manually in the way I'd always used for Windows XP - log on as admin, use "Add a local printer", and create a new local port of the form \\server-name\printer-share. This works fine when you log on as the admin, and other users can see it - but if anyone else tries printing to it it just sits in the print queue with "Error - printing". I've tried making a test student a local admin, adding all permissions for everyone in the printer's Security tab, and it still doesn't work. Where am I going wrong here? Do I really have to use some logon script or something? Or would you expect this to work, in which case I could try deleting it off the server and adding again etc...?

I tried that, but just had another chaotic controlled assessment session where a bunch of computers had randomly lost them once again. So far, it's always been just this one room, and this morning, one PC in the Art Dept. They're all the same type - Dell Optiplex 745/755. Weird. But anyway, I give up...soon as I get the chance I'm going to take that policy, jump up and down on it, and reinstall the printer manually.

...that sounds like the safest bet, but it's a bit of a problem in a school situation though, in terms of students using different machines, centralised backups, etc...

(Thanks for the ideas...the program is installed locally and the ASIO drivers are set OK. Just noticed I'd reconnected the server to one of the standard 10/100 ports on the switch instead of the 1GHz port, so maybe that why it's started falling over. I'll look into that thing about local temp files...)

Induction day today, and the Music Dept is trying (and failing) to run Cubase projects with half a dozen stereo tracks simultaneously on 10 PCs. It's glitching all over the place, or as one of the disgruntled students put it, "It sounds like dubstep". They haven't complained about this before, but perhaps they don't often try to run these kinds of projects on every machine at once, or maybe it's a problem with a replacement switch they're temporarily using. They have a pretty basic dedicated server with a large IDE drive in it. They want to increase the number of machines next year, and I'm wondering what I need to put in place to cope...?