Willott

The software for on top of AD is possibly just as much if not more than buying a Mac mini server. Other thing to watch out for is OSX Lion (next version coming out in summer). This looks like it may be better for supporting connecting to AD and windows file shares (features like DFS and a couple of other things). Also, OSX lion will also include the server portions in the general OS disc (may need a separate install) so, depending on how confident you feel you could stick it on a basic mac mini (or still just buy the mac mini server with dual 500GB drives for ~750-800). If you have a look on the website for admitmac or similar you may see what the pricing is like and be surprised.

Not sure to be honest, I have one of the same (though with green disks), and only thing I can suggest is not sticking encryption on the disks, kcryptd doesn't seem to run multicored/threaded so it causes a significant bottleneck and sustained transfer rates of ~10MBs. Is Data Encryption Worth Destroying Your NAS' Performance? : Atom D510 And Encryption is quite an interesting read on the subject.

You're trying to get to an external FTP site? Does your FTP client have the ability to specify a proxy server? If so, stick the EMBC web proxy in and I think you should be golden (iirc they will proxy ftp on the http). On LA own network so can't test to confirm. Cheers Will

I think that the "broken proxy" thing is more a broken load balancing thread, which then stalls that specific connection. Other one... no idea! I know I'd been having issues accessing edugeek this week...

Thanks for replies thus far - DPM isn't an option for backing up (hence why I mentioned this in first post). @john - Don't suppose you could let me know who you bought Arcserve from, or any rough pricing?

Over the next couple of years I'm looking at doing a couple of projects, firstly, this year I'll be looking to get a second disk based storage device to replicate our backups to - to be kept offsite (either in County DC or at another school to keep 100Mb throughput), then next year I'd like to look at getting a Unified Storage Device (ie Sun S7xxx series) to increase our usable space and increase access speeds to data across the network (and provide more VM space). This brings in a 2-fold issue: We currently use BE2010R2 for our backup software, to make offsite more efficient we'd need to get the de-dupe addon (money money money) and then we'd need to look at options (NDMP?) for backing up the Unified Storage or NAS device efficiently. I'd been looking at DPM for backups due to cost and the data transfer required for offsite replication (after initial) would be relatively small, and would be a constant stream (rather than a lets push 1.3TB on a saturday night), however this can't do CIFS or NDMP backup. Looked at Ahsay due to it's offsite abilities, but not sure about it's Enterprise features (or CIFS backup ability). Other NDMP capable software seems to shift into enterprise class backup software (and enterprise cost) So... how do you guys who have Sun devices do your backups, and what do those of you with offsite/online replication use (and if there's anyone who fits in both boats... info gratefully received).

Cheaper on Scan! Very nice drive... seems that bottle necks are starting to move from the storage media (ie HDD platters used to be slow part) to the storage interface.

It's fully gui based, so easier to see where things are applying, and logging for it shows in event viewer which can be helpful for seeing where issues lie. It's probably more an alternative than better - the targetting is very easy to complete, which may be usefuly for some people, I wouldn't like to script some of the targetting which can be put in place. Cheers Will

Health warning on the above... once you've started on GPP you may end up converting any logon scripts etc you currently have (I'm going to be moving our drive mappings across to it shortly, have used it to deploy some files and registry settings to change our logon screen)! Nothing bad for your health really... just time consuming to start with (but pays off afterwards)

Could Group Policy Preferences be used - don't know what OS your clients use. We use this for deploying/deleting printers - you can filter based on OU, machine details, all sorts, and set to delete all shared printer connections as one of the preference items (I'd suggest this being 1st one!).

Regional Broadband Consortium. @sukh - if a single email is infected with a virus, this can only be transferred/do damage if it is opened on a client machine (which should have centrally managed AV) or if it's sent in an email (which would go via external filtering/scanning which would detect virus and remove). The other thing to consider is how a virus would get there - intentionally attached to an email within a mailbox from an unprotected machine? Even if it somehow ended up trying to run on the Exchange server, this should be when a standard AV would pick it up (obviously standard AV with execptions for the Exchange databases) - but how would it end up running on the Exchange server?

No info on that I'm afraid - used to be on Webroot but now it's Mailmarshal... seems to be roughly the same setup between the two. It looks like Smoothwall's new offering is still off Exchange box, so should work in the same way should you want to use for internal-internal filtering. Cheers Will

Depends on how big your Exchange org is, volume of emails, cost of filtering products, how your servers are spec'd etc etc We do it this way as email filtering is part of the service provided to us by County. So we don't have to pay for further filtering and don't have to worry about the extra load on the Exchange server (the load or rewriting an address compared with the load of scanning an email is negligible) that would be seen with an on server scanning solution. With this way round, there can be servers optimized for spam/virus scanning and servers optimized for Exchange. For everything else we look to split roles to provide best performance, reliability, resilience and configurability, so why change that for email hosting and scanning? It also seems to be the way that one of the "providers" for education have their Exchange Org setup, as this is the way both our County and previous RBC are setup.

If Smoothwall does filtering via SMTP then there's a way to get your exchange box to send internal email out to the SMTP (routing agent to rewrite address) - and if the Smoothwall is then able to rewrite addresses it can be delivered back in... That's the way we currently handle internal to internal mail with the County's mail filtering platform

If you want to buy more packets, keep the voucher codes and send the biscuits on, I'd be more than happy to oblige in receiving them

The pitch we had out trailer tent on didn't have hard standing from what I remember - I think they have part hard standing, part grass pitches with EHU.

We went here last summer. Nice campsite, though a little windy. Although it says no EHU with tent, they seemed very flexible, so I wouldn't think it's impossible (spose it depends how busy they are). Certainly worth a try! Looks like I'm a bit late, but the recommendation's there for anyone else!

I was looking at SSDs yesterday, it's out of price range, but I saw the OCZ IBIS range of drives... tasty indeed!

I think my smoothie box must've filtered it out...

I'm hoping you missed the sarcasm tags there... I'll head over to SupportNet later on (once I've found the relevant legal bits and bobs) and have a dicscussion on there (as suggested by my LEA).

Is it wrong that I haven't changed the clock in the IT room that the office is off just to mess with the kids minds?!

Hi guys, We have a user who has eyesight difficulties. We've set the display resolution to a point where they can see icons etc suitably, but then have hit an issue with SIMs. The menu bar is displaying at a suitable size, but input boxes and the timetable print out display with very small text. Does anyone know of a way of altering display sizes within SIMs? When I've got a bit more time I'll ask on SupportNet as well, but I know there are quite a few SIMs gurus on here... Cheers Will

Do they still charge for firmware on switches? I've been able to download stuff (ie updated switch firmware) for free from the Cisco Tools site recently. Routers seemed to require a support contract to get firmware updates.

Look for headers to confirm whether the message originated at your server or was sent through it as an open relay. If it originated at your server, check IIS logs - if the user is showing as logged on it may suggest virus/malware on their home PC, or a compromised user account. Cheers Will

Considering the measures you have in place on your server, have you checked message headers to confirm that the emails have come from your server (and not spoofed address by some external mail server)? If so, have you checked IIS logs to for the time the emails were sent to see if someone was logged into that account? The headers may also suggest the method used to connect to your exchange server to send the emails. Cheers Will