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That would work well with a short throw projector, but the cabling length (and hence cost) for a 'standard' projector would mean you'd probably spend more on the extra VGA lead than a splitter box.

Apparently there is... romburning - Etherboot/gPXE Wiki

I have some old laptops like this, and the only way I can get round their dodgy PXE non-booting is by using gPXE boot - sigh. Sounds like the best you can do is carry on using gPXE, or get some new PCI NICs... I suppose it might be possible to have gPXE as a separate boot partition on the HD, but there are realms of complexity... ho hum

Yeah I got an email explaining the situation about an hour after getting into work. A memeber of our own staff had already emailed me about the lack of gmail...

I assume your non-realtek machines are pxe-booting fine? Sorry for stating the obvious - but have you tried a firmware upgrade for you real-tek NICs? (I think that helped me with a laptop somewhere along the way with FOG)

Another possibility is using a VGA splitter that uses a PC's PSU and installs into one of the card slots. Lindy do some good ones - however they don't fit in half height slots. Also certain HP machines (eg. DC7700 tower) where there are slots are slightly obscured by a flange, they won't fit. They are powered by the PCs standard power cable. Video Splitter - X-VGA, Internal, 2 Port | Video Splitters & Extenders | Sharing, Converting, Extending | LINDY UK Splitter Y cables, mean you get less signal power and the problems of reflections from a long cable. You will really need a powered VGA splitter or at least a seperate VGA card. I've got some spare internal one's I won't be able to use if you want to try one (or two..)

Have been using FOG successfully for a while now, seems to work very well - even for whole IT suites at a time (will que up machines).

Actually, our drobo-pro is having problems running for long periods of time, so I'm not so happy with it (as well as being slow to run one vm). It seems to drop the connection after a random amount of time (between a week to several weeks). Ho hum...

Update on our drobo-pro. It seems to hang after running for a few weeks in iSCSI mode. We've had it running with the latest firmware and had sent it back for one repair (but now the warranty has expired - sigh). I had thought it wasn't coping with the large 2Tb partitions we were using for vm-ware, but it is now certified for vm-ware and we followed their suggestions on setting it up for vm-ware. I might try using it for non-critical stuff. It is recommended to fill it with disks to increase the speed, but it doesn't help us too much. Also tried using port 3261 instead of 3260. We are running one vm server on it (which is running MS DPM) using ESXi I'm going to migrate that to an openfiler SAN instead I think...

Managed to get the dongle working for a virtual server running windows 2003. The dongle was plugged into an old PC running debian linux and the usbip server. I did need to update the kernel, as you need >= 2.6.28 for support for usb over ip. Apart from the link above, the following link was useful for the windows side: How To Modify Your Gnu/Linux Box To Serve As A USB Over IP Server | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials I imagine it could be used for other dongles and usb access for virtual machines.

If anyone is still struggling with dongles on virtual servers and doesn't want to shell out some cash, this might be handy: How To Modify Your Gnu/Linux Box To Serve As A USB Over IP Server | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials Just of to try it out with an old machine and a debian5 CD...

Brilliant - just the same problem I have encountered...

Using VMWare data recovery for our ESX now. It's free for ESX enterprise. So not much use if you are running ESXi (then ghetto is for you). It does have de-duplication - which works very well and apparently supports CIFS (haven't tried that). Chart of versions that licensed for data recovery: http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/buy/editions_comparison.html Data recovery info: http://www.vmware.com/products/data-recovery/

there is a project to make this a bit easier called FREESCO, which has NAT etc built in, used to use it for sharing a modem ages ago.. FREESCO Project It will do NAT for you..

Not sure about the wireless function of these (we are using the wired 2000 lumen model), but they are very good so far (we've only had one for ~2 months) as a drop in replacement for Sanyo and Misubishi projectors. Green Slim Projectors - Projectors - Products - Casio They are LED/Laser projectors, so they should last a lot longer than the traditional halide bulb type ones...

I put my script in the sam location as my backups - ie an actual vm store, rather than on the host itself. I found most of the info I needed at a now dead page, but for ghettoVCB newbies there's more info on the ghettoVCB page: VMware Communities: ghettoVCB.sh - Free alternative for backing up VM's for ESX(i) 3.5 and 4.0+ - Updated 04/20/2010

I've found that if you change the number of backups you want kept before it rolls over the first one, it doesn't keep track of the numbers properly, so you may need to manually delete a few backups if you change the numbers. The gzip option works, but takes a while. If you leave a VM with a snapshot on it (naughty) it won't get backed up. It does work on ESX even in a cluster (although you have to run it on each machine in the cluster - as it will only backup vms running on the box it's running on). Works well for us though, it's free and I've recovred vms with it without a problem PS. running our as a cron job and backing up to a NFS server.

Also using ghettoVCB to backup VMWare VMs here. Works very well, even on the full ESX.

Ahhh someone else got there before me.. I've got a squeezebox too. Works well for me, plugged into a an old set of speakers and the music stored on a small 500MHz server. The squeezebox software is opensource and you can get plugins for it (like RSS scrolling displays and the like). It reconises most media formats (aac, flac, mp3 etc..) and apparently works with itunes.. (although I haven't tried that)

We are using papercut MF - for copiers and printers. Very stable and easy to deploy. Works with AD groups nicely. Has loads of reporting options and printing filters. Running it on a windows 2003 server. Very happy with it. Having said that, I've heard good things about PCounter too.

Yes, I've got a drobo. It's going to be sent off for repair, but despite that - I'd say it's not bad. high storage capacity with that ability to use mismatched disks and thin storage. Apparently it does de-duplication too. The only problem is the speed. It isn't going to be comparable to something like the SUN boxes. We use it for our backup store. Tried running a virtual machine on it, which worked - just a bit slow. We have a drobo-pro. The elite model might be a bit faster.

That should already be correct. I've attached an example shot of an old account from our AD, which is setup ok for smoothwall. Where the username is student1 See below...

Thanks, very useful Also a note with the drives. The SIMS backup will save stuff to c: (you can't change it) - EVEN if you are running the database on d: drive So don't make the c: too small or you'll fill it up with backup file pretty quick (especially as they aren't compresssed now)..

I'd agree with that. I switched to using Meru wireless points to get more wireless points installed. Adding extra wireless point may help - you might need to manually load balance the laptops if they are used only in one place (ie. setup different SIDs and configure half to access one SID etc etc..) If you need to roam, then it might be more tricky without a managed wireless sytem. Managed wireless systems work well, but even they have there limits when comes to many laptops in on room. We got ok results until about 24 laptops in one room. Then again if we had better WLAN cards we might do better. Also some wireless cards in the laptops themselves don't do any favours. We have Intel 2200's and they don't allow adjustments like reducing the fragmentation threshold - which can reduce the number of wireless collisions by using small wireless packets. Another trick you can try is if you have laptops that do 802.11a - you can have half your laptops using that and half using 802.11g. About 12 laptops seems to be when you get severe bottlenecks on one AP.

If you can remove the switch, then maybe plug it into a PC with a copy of wireshark running to scan for any arp packets the switch send out. You might be able to find it's subnet from that.