james_yale

10GBe on ProCurve here as well, we're using the first generation short range optical stuff and did have to have some new (OM3) fiber pulled but it works well right upto (and slightly over) the 350M recommended maximum distance. There are some newer fiber modules now (J9144A) that will do 10GB over older fiber, I wouldn't use copper interconnects between buildings - it's not very scalable for future use and there are issues with electrical if the buildings are on different supplies (highly likely).

What is the netmask on the access point? You should also be able to somehow get the AP to dump it's routing table which will tell you what the current default route (and gateway) is.

iSCSI targets act like any other normal block device, and creating hard links is dependant on the file system (which is a(few) layer(s) above the block device) so it will work normally dependant on the FS you're using.

If you're going to the trouble of cabling the whole room wouldn't it make more sense to run your cabling back towards some central managed location rather than having lots of switches bolted to desks?

A NFS or SMB mounted share is definitely the way to do this, duplicating the storage seems unnecessary. The problem I suspect you will run into is permissions on the mounted share, whether you've copied the data across or not. Since you will be accessing the data via the web server the permissions applied will be those of the web server, not the user logged into Moodle (in this case). This will make it difficult to enforce access permissions on the data you're trying to keep private between different sets of users. In Moodle 1.9 there is a module called smbwebclient which creates a SMB connection using the credentials of the logged in Moodle user, getting round this problem but as far as I know nothing like that exists for Moodle 2 yet.

Ah I see - interesting configuration. Good news is that it should be fairly simple to achieve what you're after as it's a fairly standard configuration for authenticating against AD, just without the extra encryption you usually do that the same time. You should be able to make a start by following the guide here (as posted up thread): FreeRADIUS Active Directory Integration HOWTO - FreeRADIUS Wiki But don't worry about configuring EAP, just do the bit to get ntlm_auth working to check the user accounts. If you can get ntlm_auth working then you should be pretty much there, as an added bonus you can test with radtest rather that eapol_test as you don't have to worry about the EAP/SSL negotiation. If you get stuck post up some freeradius debug output and someone can try and diagnose what is going wrong: /usr/sbin/radiusd -X | tee /tmp/radius.out

I struggled to figure out why this 2 year old thread had come back to life, then struggled more to figure out what you're trying to do Are you trying to authenticate by username/password AND MAC address as I'm just about to roll out (more or less) that exactly configuration, so could probably help you..

Just finished the 2005->2008 migration myself, had the same error logging in users failing with reason 0. We migrated the database to a different system so had to move the SQL login accounts as well as the SIMS user accounts (contained in the SIMS database). There is a guide from Microsoft on how to do that here: How to transfer the logins and the passwords between instances of SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 Secondly our install of SQL Express wasn't accepting remote connections because for some reason it had set the SQL Server Browser service to disabled, once we enabled that clients (SQL Management Studio is useful for testing) were able to connect without issue.

This or some other cluster file system. I haven't used oc2fs - is it providing the HA service too? If you're having problems there, perhaps you could separate off the high availability part to another service, LVS (The Linux Virtual Server Project - Linux Server Cluster for Load Balancing) or similar? Alternatively you could avoid cluster file systems all together if you exported the storage via some network file system, say, NFS or SMB/CIFS, though this introduces another single point of failure.

I'm not sure if you can use the port on the front of the bladecenter to directly connect through to a blade's network interface (strongly suspect not) but you certianly can directly map it to one of the free switch ports on the back of the bladecenter. I'd suggest leveraging your investment in your new infrastructure would be preferable to buying more legacy servers too.

How about adding the users to /etc/passwd on your NFS server for a test?

I think there might be some benefits for caching in terms of intelligent read ahead and cache utilisation. Having the DB on a remote system also has some advantages if you ever need to move the mysqld. On the ID mapping, remember that NFS matches users based on their numeric ID, not the name.

I can't see a reason not to go gigabit now. HP wise, you might like to look at the ProCurve 1810G series - they offer VLAN support, port aggregation and have GBIC slots which is a reasonable feature set for an edge switch, at a price point pretty close to the Netgear options.

When is the network connection slow - how are you quantifying this? Slow logon times, packet loss? Does it only occour in certain parts of the school? Having copper between buildings isn't ideal but there are plenty of sites that manage fine with it - do you have a budget to do some additional cabling? And a network diagram illustrating the links between the switches may help us identify potential bottlenecks in the network.

I'd be interested in hearing people's experiences too - currently using alot of ESXi which works well but it extremely limited feature wise. XenServer adds in the extra features but doesn't seem have as wide a range of OS support as ESXi, or at least makes the OSes harder to provision. KVM could be the answer, downloading 5.4 now so will give it a shot at some point.