Zimmer

It works for our D-Link KMV's no problem

Are you installing ISA on a clean Server 2003 installation?

Server 2008 TS Gateway will do the job just fine. Currently our IT Support team members use Remote Desktop to access their office workstations while at home, rather than using a VPN, directly RDP'ing to the workstations was just easy and simple. However, I have always worried about the level of security of RDP traffic through our primary Internet connection. So when we started to roll out 2008 boxes in the server farm I decided to setup a TS Gateway Server just for a play around - Now we all use it by standard! Basically the RDP packet payload is encapsulated in SSH then bundled into an SSL session, essentially making the Remote Desktop session impossible to listen to on the wire Plus it gives the added bonus of allowing anyone with an external workstation that has port 443 access to the Internet can remote into their office machine (providing the client has the latest version of the MS RDP application).

Ours is a bit of a funny one really, because we script the creation of all our accounts we basically have all the student user objects in one single container in AD. Domain Root --> College Users --> Students --> Generated Accounts We also hold our staff and temp accounts in the same fashion: Domain Root --> College Users --> Staff --> Generated Accounts With the exception of the following: Domain Root --> College Users --> Staff --> IT Support Domain Root --> College Users --> Students --> Online Testing Domain Root --> College Users --> Adimistrators --> Server Admins

Sorry to come into the thread late chaps... I was going to say the same thing, we had this issue a while back where shortcuts that are created by the login script were pointing at executable on an applications server that no longer lived there. Sometimes the wait was up to a minute! To avoid this sort of thing we have started using DFS for pretty much everything now.

I agree, the parsing of Windows performance logs are very powerful tools that are massively under used by many admins. We use perfmon to monitor most of our servers basic activities. With your proxy watch out for disk IO, if you have setup your proxy to cache content then the primary bottleneck is probably going to be the disk access speed.

Clustering with Exch2007 is really easy to be honest. Have you thought about server roles yet? Client Access, Hub Transport and Mailbox servers all need to be taken into consideration. We currently have our Mailbox servers clustered on Server 2008 Enterprise boxes, four physical servers that form a two cluster environment. One for staff and another for students, with a cluster member in each of the two server rooms with have on site (for maximum fail over). If your going to cluster Exch2007 consider SAN storage too, and don't forget about dedicated 'heartbeats' between the cluster members. If your going to go down the Exch2007 route then clustering is the future if you have the budget to do it! We also use Veritas Backup Exec to backup our mailboxes, not a bad word to say about Backup Exec, we have always been very happy with the product. For the actual mail server OS backup we simply use NT Backup, or as it is called in 2008 now 'Server Backup' to capture the system state.

Yup I'm working over Christmas unfortunately. Thankfully nothing major to do other than build a few replacement servers and do a spot of DR drilling - All in all it's going to be a nice and relaxing Christmas at the office! Plus this year I'm going to dress my desk up with tinsel and lights even more than I did last year!

Yay... It's about time Lost returned!

The HP Ultrium StorageWorks autoloading drives are good... I've always used them and would recommend them to anyone!

As essauk can probably agree the higher speed JaNET links failry quick at pulling certain ISO files ;)

Does look rather interesting I must admit, but personally I will stick with the VB scripted method we currently have in place as it's zero cost and works perfectly We currently have a VB script wrote in-house that reads a CSV file and then creates the AD account, adds an Exchange mailbox with relevant student/staff email address and populates the 'Home' folder running on a nightly basis. Plus on a Friday it uses XCACLS to reset all permissions on both the 'Home' folders and 'Shared' folders. For student accounts that have been flagged for deletion it will move their 'Home' folder to a safe backup location and also XMERGE their Exchange PST file to that same location.

I've always been interested in how others name their workstations and servers... Good thread choice The way we do it is rather simple, kind of like how Gibbo does it, its "Room Number"-"Incremental Number" for student workstations. For staff machines we tend to go "Room Number"-"Users Name" as staff usually have their own fixed work areas/desks. For servers we use "OC"-"Server Name". For example OC-STAFFMAIL1 or T200-01. The idea behind the use of "-" in the machines name is so VB scripts can quickly identify the location of a workstation by looking at what comes before the "-". In the past this has been extremely useful for login and startup scripts where something can't be done using Group Policy

How are you finding response time with 300+ concurrent users? What hardware are you hosting Moodle on? Also, is it on a Linux box or have you gone down the XAMPP route? We have chosen to go Windows with a XAMPP install, and it's also running in a virtual environment. We are currently thinking of moving Moodle to dedicated hardware as we feel that performance isn't to great!

If it wasn't for that visionary all that time ago we wouldn't be graced with the beauty of the Logitec G9 mouse today. Hats off to the mouse!!!

We are currently phasing out a purchased VLE solution from a company called Technical (who I would not recommend by the way!) to the more popular Moodle platform. We are also using Sharepoint for the Staff Intranet at the moment, which seems to be gaining a lot of popularity since we introduced it last summer. In terms of usage the current VLE is heavily used by students right from day one of their courses, all our screening tests are hosted through the VLE and most course material is accessible via the VLE. With Moodle slowly being eased into the wild we are hoping that all the content will be moved over and actually being used by staff and students before the end of the Christmas holidays, we currently have around 2TB of data to migrate.

JaNET have just recently upgraded our Primary SuperJaNET3 connection from 10Mbit fibre to a whopping 100Mbit fibre via Manchester Computing Center As Tony said earlier I highly recommend Barracuda Networks for filtering solutions. We have a Barracuda Spam Firewall and a Barracuda IM Firewall and we have been extremely impressed with the products from day one. Plus when you purchase if you ask nicely they will send you a T-Shirt that says "Eat Spam" on the back with the cuda' logo

Sorry I should have been a little more specific there. I sometimes do a war drive around the town when driving to or from work... It's amazing how many unprotected (and even just WEP protected) base stations are out there. However I did once use the GPS feature of NetStumbler to do a 'perimeter' survey of our campus (which is roughly 300 meters by 500 meters) just to see how much WiFi we was leaking into the surrounding areas - The results were actually rather interesting.

Indeed NetStumbler is probably the best application for WiFi detection. I even have it installed on my Dell Axim PDA, and along with a bluetooth GPS I can plot wireless base station locations then import the data to Google Maps

I don't think I've ever used Scroll Lock! I must find a productive use for this neglected key!

Funny you should say that Ric, we had a batch over the summer that had more than a few dodgy stands, 34 to be exact that all leaned to the left! We kicked off a big fuss with them and they were happy enough to send someone out the following week to do a swap out of all the bad stands! I felt sorry for the engineer they sent out because we had Kensington locked all the monitors to the tables which made his job fairly difficult oops!

Indeed - The isaserver.org and msexchange.org websites are valuable resources for any Exchange or ISA admin... Well worth a read

Not seen this issue with 2008 unfortunately. However I have seen something almost identical on 2003 R2 (64bit) on our file servers last year. Do you aggregate the dual Intel NIC's using the Intel driver software? We configure our file servers with Intel dual NIC's for added throughput and for a bit of failover should one of the switches in the stack fail. Anyway, we found it was down to the latest drivers from Intel, we rolled back to a previous version and the problem was solved. We have since upgraded to 2008 and we are using the latest drivers from Intel's support site and we haven't had a problem yet (touch wood!).

There is a lot of different ways to you can setup OWA for external access. We publish ours through ISA2006, which requires the SSL certificate to be installed on the ISA server and the Exchange server. Do you have any spare public IP addresses available at your site? What is your border firewall/NAT device? I also believe the 'subject' of the certificate has to match what the OWA client's machine will resolve by DNS - Or am I confusing myself with TS Gateways!?!

We have used AG Neovo for a good four/five years up until recently and never had a problem with them. Always purchased glass fronted TFT's for the obvious reasons. Just started using Edge10, the build quality isn't as good as Neovo but they will support us on-site for faults (which is nice) and the 22" widescreen models look amazing in the learning centres!