fxlite

Hi all. I am a little confused as to why this 2012 R2 install with an intel RS2BL080 (some rebranded LSI controller) is showing some volumes as physical and virtual...it did not do this on initial install, and the only thing I've done is install AD/DNS, set a backup schedule and install sophos AV client. I am hesitant to unmount them as the server is very much in use dishing files out, but I've never actually seen anything do this before... Disk 0 is a 2x500GB RAID1 Disk 1 is a 5x1TB RAID 5 Disk 2,3,4 are ghostly virtual versions of volumes on the above. Any ideas? EDIT: Nevermind - this is apparently what wbadmin does when you create VSS full backups...you also cannot change a wbadmin schedule from VSS full to VSS copy without dismounting them first

You literally read my mind and put it in that post. Or have two drives - each time you visit replace it with the new backup...sounds so silly but it'd be effective And surely if you're serious about hosting you'd just rent some servers? I dunno.

Our staff can access their shares from home along with virtual desktop sessions, but sometimes you get someone who will look at something like dropbox and go "oooh, shiny!" and just use it regardless of reason, advice and policy

I actually thought BC was more fun than wrath...rose tinted glasses, probably...but as many have said, after wrath it's been so-so.

Yeah look up conditional forwarding as previously mentioned. I would love to know why you have 3 domains, though.

I don't understand why people would want 300mbit connections... What kinda things do you do with your connection?

To be honest, if you want to send WOLs to different subnets or VLANs I'd just give whatever server's NIC you were sending it from an IP on each VLAN, otherwise you'll have to set up a zillion iphelpers.

Current server is 2003 and there is no direct upgrade path. The chances are we will either double hop or use a third party tool to get to 2013, but I just wanted to get some ideas of requirements...I'm guessing 2013 is similar to 2010 (2013 did seem to stuff its face with RAM more than 2010 when I tested them) Another question is how clever is 2010 or 2013 at deduplicating data?

16GB of RAM? That is surprising! Thanks for the replies - I'm obviously highly overspeccing this. Will probably end up going in a VM on one of the blades if this is the case, with split storage accross a couple of LUNs.

Hi guys. I'm wondering what people have bought in terms of servers to run their exchange 2010 installs. We have around 2500 users, and I was thinking a 2x6 core xeon 48gb (possibly more) RAM would suffice, and as far as disks go I was thinking of ignoring 15k spinny disks in favour of 7.2k with more capacity (and probably the same speed sequentials r/w). I was also looking at using one/a couple of SSDs for caching. We have SANs available but with the silly amount of disk IO exchange seems to generate I don't really want to put more pressure on them... Any suggestions?

I've used pfsense with dansguardian a couple of times...it's not that hard to set up and works fine with ldap. You have to use legacy adapters in Hyper-V for pfsense, though...and you have to up/down the interfaces for them to work properly sometimes. Just any old machine with 2 nics you've got lying around would do.

I'll have to check the DNS paths tomorrow...as far as I know they should be identical. It didn't work with fqdn either, no. A ping -a of a machine IP will return its name minus the domain suffix.

I'd advise using powershell to be honest, but if you're unfamiliar with it then by all means go the gui way. Something along the lines of: Get-ADUser -Filter * -SearchBase "ou=students,dc=domain,dc=sch,dc=uk" | Set-ADUser -employeeid yourNewID

Hi all. I'm having an issue in which I'm able to PXE boot on either subnet (thanks to IP helpers) but only actually access the MDT$ share on one subnet (the same subnet that the MDT server is on). The WinPE boot gets to the point of putting credentials in for the share and says "invalid credentials: network path not found". Pressing F8 for the command prompt allows me to ping stuff via IP but names don't appear to resolve properly, and I can't seem to map the drive via IP (e.g. net use * \\10.4.20.5\mdt$). Any suggestions? ps There are DCs/DNS on both subnets.

Thanks for your help - turns out you were completely right and I was being too impatient...demoted gracefully in the end (did take a good 1.5 hours though). I should really show these 8 year old servers some sympathy

It's been stuck on the RemoteRegistry bit for around 40 minutes...nothing seems to be happening in task manager. If we decide to "nuke it" (what would this involve?) wouldn't it still be picked up in AD somewhere? Thanks.

A server we're trying to demote is hanging on the Securing RemoteRegistry part of dcpromo. A new 2012 R2 server was set up, all replicated fine, FSMO roles transferred successfully and all logs seemed fine. Any ideas?

Thanks for the reply - I actually have a small business 365 account and forgot it was 50GB! God knows who actually has a mailbox that big... After reading a bit more I am slowly subscribing to the belief that an on-site exchange server is largely unnecessary. I think our rationale was that, since we would have to move to either exchange 2010 SP3 or 2013 to even start with O365, we might as well retain an on-premise exchange server given that A: a hybrid license is apparently free and B: our thoughts were that it would be easier (or safer) to have two solutions in place in case we went for a phased upgrade (moving users across in chunks) or in case something else went pear shaped. Oh, I've just looked at the manageability side again on my 365 account and realised it seems to be possible to use all the exchange 2013 cmdlets on O365 (I thought it was only the cmdlets in the MSOnline module that were available). edit - I'll have to check how many IPs we've got and how many we're currently using for stuff...we have a wildcard cert so I don't see ADFS being a huge issue.

Thanks for the reply. The move from 2003 to 2013 isn't my biggest concern to be honest. There are third party solutions (codetwo) for about £50 that will (allegedly) migrate everything over with a few clicks. Does anyone have experience with hybrid deployments? Does having on site dirsync and exchange servers increase manageability enough to be worth it? I have trawled through technet but can't seem to find concrete answers. Thanks again!

Hi guys. We need to upgrade our ageing 2003 install and have decided, for a variety of reasons (mostly due to the 30GB mailbox storage you get) to go with Office 365 with an exchange 2013 server on-site. The reason for having an on-site exchange server, as far as I understand it, is greater manageability (I know you can create remote PSSessions with O365 but it doesn't have the same/as many cmdlets) and also the easier management of users and distribution groups. I may be wrong about all my assumptions so far, so please correct me if I am wrong Now, I understand upgrading from 2003 to 2013 is a hassle, but my question is what would an upgrade path look like for a 2003 to 2013 O365 hybrid setup? Do we migrate 2003-2013 first then set up the 365/azure/ADFS? Also, we are looking at salamander (something which apparently takes information out of facility and puts it into AD...not examined at it in detail but I don't like the look of it) so if anyone has any experience with that it would be good to hear... Thanks for any comments