AngryTechnician

We're not taking any at present. The regular storage is an iSCSI NAS on the far side of the site, so all our backups are remote. In my entire career I've never had to restore anything that was more than a couple of weeks old or was a full system restore, and our current system covers that. We are currently discussing whether we start keeping monthly archives of our MIS data, but again, it's never been needed before. I certainly won't be using tape if we go down that route.

Interesting, thanks. I'll keep monitoring to see if the errors seem to mention Exchange more often than other servers. Did yours start with SP1 or was it just a problem you've had once in the past?

Ever since upgrading my 2008 R2 servers to SP1, my DPM 2010 server (on Hyper-V) has been decidedly flaky. Since upgrading I haven't managed an uptime of more than 2 1/2 days before the server becomes unresponsive and spits out emails like this to the configured alert account: The DPM server still responds to ping and appears OK at first, but I can't log in either via RDP or the Hyper-V console (it hangs on "Configuring remote session" or "Please wait for the user profile service" respectively. Remote RPC calls also time out. Both guest and host have been upgraded to SP1. No other guests are exhibiting problems. It's different data sources every time, seems to be just whatever happened to be running at the time. There's nothing in the event logs on either server that correlate with the timings of the problem, and no errors being logged recently that haven't been logged before. Is it just me or is anyone else seeing odd behaviour with a similar setup?

Here it is:

It sounds like you have Integrated Windows authentication enabled for the OWA site. Machines in school will work correctly with this because they are on the same domain, but non-domain machines will try to send the local computer name as the domain part of the logon. If you are using a separate OWA site for external access, you can simply turn off Integrated auth and use Basic (over HTTPS, of course). If you use the same site for internal and external access, you'll have to decide which is more inconvenient: your current problem, or not having Integrated auth when on site.

There's a long thread going about this one already: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/general-chat/71778-compromised-websites-anyone-else-affected-yet.html It's not just Hotmail by a long shot, so a block there will not be effective.

Sounds like a repeat of the RSAT for Vista, which wasn't even available until some time after Vista SP1 broke support for the Server 2003 admin tools (which was the only option for RTM).

The only requirement I know of is that the BIOS needs to support APM 1.2 or later. This standard is 15 years old, so the hardware should support it.

On the teacher's personal machine I did on Monday, I only had to remove the entry under RunOnce using Autoruns and was then able to boot up and remove the remnants with Microsoft Security Essentials. Didn't stop the damned thing getting on there in the first place though. VIPRE Protect, on the other hand, has been nailing it with the on-access scanner every time. Zero affected school workstations so far as a result.

I almost thought about buying some of these instead of a class set of laptops this year. Then I found out the iPad has no multi-user support. Call me when you can do something other than a 1-to-1 deployment and we'll talk.

Group Policy Preferences are just that - preferences. They don't prevent the user from changing the setting themselves (though it may be reapplied at the next gpupdate). I still set my proxy settings in regular Group Policy as that stops anyone from fiddling with them.

If the machine is in Hibernate or Standby rather than being shut down, you could also configure a task in the Task Scheduler with the "Wake the computer to run this task" option selected.

I like how their shot of "Prime Minister David Cameron" was actually Cleggers.

Wrong still, all the pupils and staff will be running everything on their phones. No infrastructure needed! I mean what could go wrong, Gmail works fine on my Samsung Omnia on Vodafone... I would also go for 2 double sockets per classroom, one at the front with the projector connections and one near the back.

Wonder if any of them were also Vodafone users in the Thames Valley area and got doubly shafted by no email and no phone service? BBC News - Thousands lose Vodafone service

Can you check your scheduled tasks event logs on the hosts to see if there is some background task being run periodically that might correspond with the timing of the errors? Event Viewer > Applications and Services Logs > Microsoft > Windows > TaskScheduler > Operational In particular any tasks that have to do with the disks...

Are they always at those specific times? Or always 30 minutes apart?

Am I right in thinking that all 4 links are dropping at once, across both cards? If so, it would seem to rule out host hardware as an issue. That still leaves host software, the switch, or the SAN, unfortunately. Are you using the Microsoft iSCSI connector on the Hyper-V hosts or a third party? Also, what model is the D-Link switch?

To me, that sounds a lot easier said than done. How would you go about doing it? The other extra you get with Windows Storage Server is iSCSI target software is included.

Couple of questions: Do the network adapters have iSCSI offloading, and if so, are you using the drivers that provide this? Are you able to monitor traffic to check the host is definitely using all 4 NICs for iSCSI, not just preferring 1 all the time?

It's normal for emails read in OWA to exhibit this, but not those sent to other recipients. My guess would be that the original URL was copied from an existing email in OWA and then pasted into a new email, rather than being created directly?

And they say 'Just for Men' doesn't work.

Oh, and while we're at it, here's the MST I mentioned that I use to ensure that the AutoCollage MSI doesn't hang when deployed through GPO Software Installation (on XP it tries to do a WGA check that requires the user to click next on a dialog that doesn't exist during GPO installation). As usual, test before deploying! You never know, they may have fixed the installer so it doesn't do it any more. AutoCollage Suppress WGA.mst

That was actually a friend of mine and he'll be well chuffed to be referred to as 'lad' as he's in his mid-30s! He was only taking the mick out of me, not anyone else, as we used to work together at my last school (a secondary). I asked them to pass on a request for more step-by-step noddy instructions like the App-V Trial Guide that gives you the bog-standard install of a product that you can then play with, without having to wade through 3 chapters of deployment planning like most MS documentation. Also mentioned that the only case studies we ever see are full the all-singing all-dancing implementation of something when there's value in showing off the basics to schools with limited resources (i.e. we hear all about managed, clustered, automatic failover Hyper-V when just having the servers virtualised onto one box is worth it on its own).

I love the annotations on the score, which start off bizarre and get more ridiculous as they go on. Some of my favourites: "insert peanuts" "light explosives now... and... ... now" "slap thigh" "Play ball!" "release the penguins" "remove cattle from stage" "rests are imaginary" "balance your chair on 2 legs"