mtdant

Our teachers do expect to stream video so maybe this is the cause of the problem or at least is a heavy contributor.

Hi Thanks for your input. I did play with VLAN ing the Ruckas but managed to crash every AP in the school and had to reset them with a paperclip to fix it. I think I will try this again in the summer hols. The Ruckas is a bit complicated because every VLAN port has to be tagged and I still haven't got my head round setting this up yet. I have thought for a long time that multicasts on my network were killing the wireless and was considering VLANing the wireless. For now I will VLAN my server farm which uses multicast because this seems a lot easier and less prone to fail.

Can you give me a weba ddress for this company please or shall I find it by Googling it (other search engines are available!)

Because this is a public forum I do not want to name and shame the company that installed them. To be fair to them 10/100 was the norm nearly three years ago when it was installed. It will be three years this summer holiday. That's why I posted because I wanted to see if it was worth buing newer AP's. Would you recommend replacing the Zone Director with a newer one or would this be OK just with any firware upgrades? Thanks for your help

Thanks for your comment. Surely my AP's would have to be 1Gb as well in order to get more connected? I appreciate I need to put them into 1 Gb ports - I just don't have any spare. All right I have a couple so will test it on those. I basically need to replace all my switches with 1 Gb ones. Anyone recommend a particular HP switch that is layer 2, can telnet and web manage and have CLI. Must have 1Gb firbe ports (2 normally). My Ruckas AP's are ZF2942 running software version 8.2.2.0.7 Mark

Hi I have a Ruckas Zone Director 1000 and 30 AP's all 10/100. Our switches are nearly all 10/100 with 1Gb fibre between buildings. Despite being promised 50 clients able to login to the Ruckas AP we never get more than 13 connected before login slows down. They are all HP laptops and the kids are all googling the net. I have spent months trying to stop the entire system crashing and have taken the advide of the wireless company who blame our wired network. Having spent money on consultants I realise I really need to upgrade the switches. My best find was Procurve Manager 3.0 (60 day trial at the mo) which shows me realtime and logs utilisation on the ports. I have made some changes as a result and the wireless has been more stable - time will tell. What I want to know is - is it a good idea to upgrade my AP's to 1Gb N capable - ours are not I think they were installed about the time we thought about going N? I feel let down by the supplier who said we could get 50 clients on each AP. In reality if we get 15 we are lucky. If you do the maths thought they will only get about 0.5mb/s so it is hardly surprising. Who ever has a wireless client that just saves and opens files from a server. Lets face it the teachers want the kids to use the internet as the main reason for using the laptops. I have seriously thought about ripping Ruckas out and installing Aruba but money is not easy to come by any more. To be fair the system was brilliant for the first year when all clients were XP. Things have got worse since Vista and now with Windows 7 and a Server 2008 r2 functional domain level we have had these problems.

Hi Rushed off my feet for the last few days (my techie is on holiday) so have not had chance to unplug it yet, but I will try. I am having to take half term to use up my holiday so I will do this in a week and post back to you. Can I pick your brains further? I used my fluke tester to check which ports two PC's were connected to on the Core switch and one has a Low reading and the other has a Normal reading. They are physically sat next to each other and are less than 30 metres from the core switch as measured on the tester. If I get a low signal on the tester is this something I should worry about? I have noticed this on lots of things but the fluke manual is virtually useless and just shows it as low signal or normal signal. Can you advise please? Mark

We do not have any CCTV on the network, but do have an old networked webcam. I will investigate this. Interestingly I just measured the multicasts at 8:45 this morning when the thin clients were all off and it still reads 15% multicast.

Thank you so very much for taking the trouble to reply so comprehensively. I am pleased you recommend subnetting and routing as the way to control the broadcast traffic. I was coming to the conclusion that this is my only hope to move forward. The engineer who said I need not bother was in conflict with the EMBC guidelines which recommended this. I will have to dig our my training course notes from 10 years ago now to plan a managed approach to this. Interestingly my server farm with 50 10 ZIg clients adds 36% multicasts to the measured multicast % displayed on my Fluke In-line tester. The first Cisco engineer who came blamed this for causing the wireless to crash and yes the wireless did work when we disconnected the farm from the main network and connected it to a dummy one joined to a cisco switch which was not connected to the school network. However we did not try adding more wireless clients to see if the measured multicasts goes up as more clients are added. It should do in theory. Thanks for the advice about paths, resouces printers etc because I do have an issue with my Buffalo NAS boxes which randomly loose connection so this is worth checking. This problem also got worse when we upgraded the two domain controllers to Windows Server 2008 r2 x64 last summer and I unfortunately lost my entire DHCP entries because the MS guidance did not warn me that this would be lost when I wiped the main DC. I had to restore the old DC from a backup, manually copy all the DHCP entries (I even took photo's of the screen!) because I discovered I could not restore the backup of the DHCP from Server 2003 and restore it to Server 2008 after rebuilding the DC. I then had to manually recreate the entire DHCP from scratch - no mean feat. There may still be machine wrongly set etc. I will scrutinise my DNS setup again. I had already turned IGMP on on all my HP Switches and I have noticed a drop in the average multicast broadcasts but it is still up to 50% before school and got up to 90% at one point in the day. I have now started to log every MAC address on ervey port on every switch so I know what I am seeing when I go on the switches. One school in Lincolnshire even assigns a group of 5 MACs to each port so that should someone unplug and move a PC to another area they will not work! That way he stopped kids plugging their laptops in and playing Quake over the network. We do use Ghost but soon learnt not to ghost a room without disconnecting the entire room and putting it on a switch and plugging a machine with the ghost cast server into that switch. The accounts department were not happy with the slow network otherwise. Again many thanks and I will post back when I have made changes that improve things. Any other feedback would be welcome from anyone. Hope this helps others Mark

Hi Everyone I too have a Ruckas wireless LAN across my school with 30 AP's installed by Nexgen Solutions. Worked great in year 1, had issues when I introduced Vista with pre-authentication problems. Basically the kids logged in and did not get their home drive (H:). They had to logout and in again and it worked. Since last summer we upgraded everything to Windows 7 and also installed a Server Farm running RD Services to 50 10Zig thin clients. This uses multicasting to talk between the clients and servers. Since then we can have no more than 50 clients and our AP's drop off like flies. We have one default VLAN on all HP switches, no subnets anywhere. The server farm runs great but we have had two experts in, one a Cisco engineer who says if we turn the farm off the probelm goes. Not a lot of use that, because we have to use it. Yesterday we had a HP switch expert who said the core switch chassis was faulty but HP don't agree. My point is this: I am sure that the Ruckas Zone Director and AP's use multicasting and the only thing that really fails is the wireless. Nexgen say there is nothing wrong with it and I have done 5 firmware upgrades and am currently on 8.2.2.0 build 7. The only way forward seems to be to either put my server farm and clients on a VLAN or use subnetting to isolate traffic. I have bought a Fluke Inline Series II Tester and noticed that when plugged into any switch when the multicast reading goes to 95% or more the wireless falls over. At 99% the wired network slows down. I am desperate for any ideas at all because I cannot, dare not add more thin clients and on a system where with 30 AP's that should safely handle 50 clients we have never exceeded 55 clients on the entire network. Mark

Thanks Zerohour It was during scanning. Tried what you said - had to stop the automatic updates service to allow me to rename the software distribution folder though. Still no joy, but you're right I had to do this in my last job (NHS) but we never found out why! Both error messages I mentioned are not listened in the Microsoft Error codes. Mark

Hi We had Netsweeper installed by Lincs CC and they deny totally that it is their proxy because all the other schools are not having a problem. However we cannot do updates on any workstation or server. The first error said our time and date settings were wrong - they are not. I get two error codes which microsoft cannot provide a solution for that works. These are 0x80244022 and 0x80072f8f. Every thing was perfect before. Netsweeper was installed a month ago and we only noticed the problem when I installed a Server 2008 machine and tried to run updates. It did work intitially so we think it is to do with the county proxy but they say it's not! Can anyone help me with regard to these two error codes Getting desperate now because I can't put my new HP server live until this is fixed - it has to be registered and updated!

Hi Thanks for that - wish I had found this a while ago. I worked this out the hard way by trial and error. What I can't get to work is that it seems that student accounts on my AD cannot see a hidden share from the Mac so I had to create a non hidden share which I called Mac Stuff "Username". They then open the network icon on the Mac and trawl down to the AD server (DATA-1) on my network, and it "maps" a drive on the Apple Desktop. Problem is when they log out it doesn't save it because they are not an admin on the Mac. This is really annoying. Does anyone out there know how to get round this other than buying an OSX Server and building an Apple Domain? I am trying to force my Mac users (only 12 physical Macs) to save to their windows home area (h: ) so that files are backed up and they don't have local profiles on the Macs at all. I found a good use for the Macs because you can load RDP Client for Mac and remotely control a PC!

Hi Thank you so much for posting this! I have had exactly the same problem. The only problem is that I can no longer do any windows updates on any of my servers in school at all now. I don't know if this is related to this issue but it's odd that there wasn't a problem before. I am using the very same DL380 G5 server and Enterprise Edition Server 2008 64 bit edition. I bought this because the streaming media services are supposed to be better in this version. I am thinking of turning the server off completely (it's so new it's not in use yet) to see if it solves my other problems.