Willott

Procmon and see what's being denied?

Just make sure you don't fall foul of Ofcom, if using 5GHz range, it's only unlicensed for "mobile" devices - I've been looking at wifi links for my church/vicarage/church hall to try to work best solution for linking the three.

I feel this is the time for:

What folders do you see in a /home/staff/username/home folder? Are there any My Pictures or Pictures folders/files in there? What permissions are on them if they are there?

From the looks of it they're targetting high end apartment blocks, getting loads of people to sign up interest in one block, then create a PoP in that block and fibre back to it, then fibre back to main network (probably all done by OpenReach), I'd guess that you'd be unlikely to all get 1Gb all the time (daren't think what contention ratio they'll have in place).

Our Media/Web technician uses our Lion Server for his day to day work - server stuff just carries on in the background so far. Also, for managing ipads, Meraki Cloud manager may be something to look at Cheers Will

Try clicking back to accounts and see if that re-enabled the new bit - seem to remember having to do something along those lines.

Does anyone know a company (ie have experience of the company) who will do per incident OpenIndiana support (or Unix/Solaris) in a storage based environment? Cheers Will

Damnit, I haven't had breakfast this morning and that's one of my favourites... I will look forward to a nice package of fruit load and butter delivered from Smoothwall as recompense

Don't start that whole war... would you prefer me to call it a valuable commodity? The only reason you think it's inedible is because you're not strong enough to handle it!

We're off to Canada in a couple of weeks... and will be taking Cadburys to our good friends out there... in return we get plied with alcohol and have a brilliant time. This therefore implies that (decent non-american-continent crap) chocolate is far more valuable than alcohol... The cadbury's that they have out there is less than impressive as well (think that's to do with the way they treat the milk). Marmite is also a valued commodity!

Are you sure - I thought it was "Ceiling... Floor... Window... Door" (if we're talking wind the bobbin up). And on the injury subject... if you have a wall behind your sofa, be careful how high you do the bouncing on the knee or holding over the head game...

Congrats, and also thankyou - for 1) taking part in adoption, there are a lot of kids out there and 2) adopting a non-baby, the older the child the harder it is to get them adopted. Hope the rest of the process goes smoothly, and enjoy your new little one when she arrives

Used personally and not had an issue. Cheers Will

From the way 2007R2 works, you advertise to the unknown computer collection the task sequences you want, then when PXE booting, you have the various options available - there are some more steps involved, I'll see if I can find the tutorial I followed, should translate to 2012.

I was talking about theoretical limit for the disks... thought it was a max of about 100 IOPS for a 7200RPM disk

Currently we have a SAN in place which is struggling, so it's difficult to know the number of IOPs we need. I'm looking presently to provide SMB/CIFS access to 300 clients, and NFS access for a few VMs including a Smoothwall VM (which is hitting disks quite hard currently), a Securus VM (again, quite heavy on the disks), and other Windows and Linux VMs of lower load. However, in the future, I'd like capacity to be available to do VDI (or whatever technology they bring out that does VDI but better), so I'm not only considering current use, I'm looking at having some overhead for expansion. Edit: Just looked at our current SAN and seeing 2000 IOPs currently reported by it (considering that's on the RAID6 7k2RPM array I'm impressed... though a little bemused as to how we're hitting that many IOPs on that... not sure it can physically handle that!) - just found Forefront Endpoint Protection stalled on a file... which may be what was causing that load.

Main storage is on SAS, just 7200RPM rather than higher speed. On SAS to not conflict with SAS expander. One other thing I'm currently limited by is rack space, I have a 2u gap and a 3u gap, so looking at 1u head with 3U 28 drive JBOD. On the drive side of things, the drives will be either in RAIDZ3 or Mirrored VDEVs spanned in pool to get some performance out of them. The bigger performance increase should come from the ARC, L2ARC and ZIL (ARC and L2ARC should be enough to cache our working set, so once ARC and L2ARC populated, read contact with spinning rust will be minimal, write wise, ZIL should take care of ensuring that writes to the block storage is done in larger chunks, ie more sustained write type so reducing high IOP requirement from individual disks, and mirroring should see that IOPs are high enough to provide solid base). There's enough space in chassis to have 20 drives configured as mirroed vdev (RAID10 near enough) with 1 hot spare, the 2 slog/ZIL devices (8GB ZeusRAM), 1 L2ARC device, 2 syspool disks and have 2 bays spare (possible for expanding L2ARC). I would think that, on the SMB/CIFS side of things, we tend to be more read heavy, and on the VM side of things (NFS), writes will hit ZIL (NFS does sync writes), so performance should be good (in fact, I had some suppliers suggesting sticking datapool as RAIDZ2 rather than Mirrored). Cheers Will

Yep, that's why I'm shying away from the QSAN. The issue I have with well known and supported is that usually means vendor tie-in, extra cost for licenses as we move forwards, lower possible speeds (no SSD caching after all... or SSD support at all in the boxes I'm looking at). Looked at a dell solution, however it seemed overly complex - had an iSCSI back end, then a 3U bundle to 2 heads and a battery unit for doing the NAS side of things... was less than inspiring, and to get the 10GbE I'd have had to stick in a new £10k switch. Open-E I've used previously and didn't get on particularly well with it. May have a look to see if it's improved. I know what I'm looking to do in the budget I've got is a blooming big ask, but one must try! Cheers Will

Right, so in the final stages of deciding and ordering a new device for storage. Opinions on the following ideas would be appreciated, I've had quotes for the big names (EMC, NetApp, expansion of our old HP SAN), and some smaller, newer unified devices (QSAN U600Q - comes in cheap, but their unified side of things seems quite new). Of course, budget is tight, but I want to try and get the following: 10GbE connectivity Ability to saturate (or near saturate) 10GbE for sustained read and close to that for sustained write High IOPs (thousands) Low Latency Serving CIFS/SMB clients, and NFS to Xenserver (or ESXi) If anyone spots anything stupid with the above, please challenge... Options I've been looking at are: Nexenta server (Nexenta Gold licenced) 2x E5-2620 Xeon processors 128GB RAM 2x 500GB disks (syspool) 10GbE SFP+ network card 21x 1TB SAS2 7k2 RPM disks (main storage pool) 2x ZeusRAM (slog) 1x ZeusIOPS 200GB (L2ARC) Self Build OpenIndiana with Napp-IT 2x E5-2620 Xeon processors 256GB RAM (ARC) 2x 300GB disks (syspool) 10GbE SFP+ network card 21x 1TB SAS2 7k2 disks (main storage) 2x ZeusRAM (slog) 1x ZeusIOPS 200GB (or 400GB L2ARC) Obviously there is a cost difference due to licensing and slight difference in spec (and self build over built by company). The other option would be to virtualise the storage using either RDM or PCI-E Pass-through on ESXi So use the above self build spec with either Nexenta or OpenIndiana (with a couple more 300GB disks in JBOD), give VM 192GB RAM, and have 50GB ish for running other VMs on the box (with 10GbE speed if not more). Later expansion would then be put a second head node in (processors, RAM, disks for ESXi), 2 SAS switches and have the JBOD as the only point of failure (which could then be overcome with replication to a similar setup elsewhere). Now the issues I have - Nexenta don't fully support the E5 series of processors yet (even though they announced support before E5 was released), so not overly sure whether I want to go with them, also, during my conversations it's been mentioned of a few issues with version upgrades. OpenIndiana has a lot of community support, and I'm very happy in a command line environment and have a fair number of sources of help... but I'm concerned by the "mythical IT bus" aspect. Or do I just go with one of the major companies, sit back on my laurels, enjoy the fact I'm fully covered by support, but not have 10GbE (or ability to upgrade to it), no SSD caching and probably much lower performance than the above setup, or go with the QSAN, with support, 10GbE, SSD caching, but non mature software (the write cache is not currently available but will be in next firmware release). Any views appreciated. Cheers Will PS AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'll just point back to the LSI Switched SAS idea - it kinda makes a SAN out of your MSA60s and SAS HBAs in your virtual hosts. 6Gb/s SAS Switch http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public/SAS%20Switch/SAS%20Switch%20Common%20Files/LSI-Purdue_CS.pdf Should work out cheaper than a full on SAN, and give you failover capability. I've yet to test this out, but have had various reports of it working with virtual environments. Cheers Will

Resolved - looks like it may have been related to AB tutor, and doing a full winsock reset (I'd only reset the IP side of winsock) has resolved. Cheers Will

Hi guys, Hopefully someone can help me on this - trying everything I can think, but getting nowhere. On monday afternoon one of our terminal servers started exhibiting the issue below, the other then started doing it yesterday afternoon, so I'm now in major issues and looking at rebuilding servers if I can't figure this out. Any program running on the server that isn't microsoft is unable to do anything with the network. For example, papercut client is unable to connect to the server, AB tutor's client program doesn't seem to be able to open a port to listen on, so the control end is unable to connect to it, cannot start SIMs up (only other network program I could think of). However, internet explorer seems to work (intermittently), drives are mapped, SMB shares accessible. I've tried resetting winsock incase that was the issue, but doesn't seem to have done anything. Any ideas? Cheers Will

Missing a ; at the end of the $result line I think I'd also stick a conditional check to ensure you're getting a result back before trying to fetch_assoc, just incase there's nothing there at some point and you get an error instead.

In terms of SAN - Nexenta based is very good value, and can do all the funky SSD caching (stick in a couple of STEC ZeusRAM and STEC Zeus IOPS), dedupe, compression, thin provisioning, clones, snapshots etc. Backend storage can be on 7.2k RPM disks, and let (small number of very fast) SSDs give you the performance required with a non Oracle price tag. I think it's reducing the cost of the backend storage required for VDI that will help to start bringing it more as an option for larger deployment. They've also just released something that would be targetted at the VDI in a box type environment - http://www.nexenta.com/corp/nexentavsa-for-view