Essential Microsoft Troubleshooting KB

agressiv · 2 days

I've never seen a NIC flag up yellow in device manager because the cable was unplugged!

lawnmowerassassin · 2 days

Oh so it is IP after all then? That seems crazy - one of the benefits is single cable to the desk. Separate VLAN of course, but separate wire and switches is crazy - whoever implemented it was probably drunk. What flavour of ip telephony is it?

tomlette · 2 days

Seriously, this is the level we've reached now? This is supposedly a subreddit for professional and we've got threads giggling about funny names like a bunch of 8 year old girls?

thenstoicwaslike · 3 days

Oh I'm sure they do cope, was just curious how. My cat eating small biscuits tends to eat one or two at a time and takes her time crunching them.

thenstoicwaslike · 3 days

How do they cope with eating?

blackmosss · 5 days

APC if you have the money. Dell or HP are also nice for a bit less money. In my experience the cheaper racks just aren't worth the money

Angry-birds · 5 days

Not entirely. If you absolutely have to go back, there's always a way. New-MailboxExportRequest combined with Exmerge works just fine

lawnmowerassassin · 5 days

It was just a network rack for a branch with only a few servers supporting local telephony. As it's a 9-5 Mon-Fri business, nobody would even notice :)

Foezjie · 6 days

To be honest, I get that - if it's just a geeky curiosity for a bit of fun then that's fine. But this subreddit if full of people trying to justify buying servers in the name of learning and honestly, if thats genuinely the reason then they're wasting their money, IMO

demosthenex · 6 days

Well....they're missing lights out management....

Foezjie · 6 days

It's got 14gb ram and 100gb useable disk space (depending how the raid is set up).

You can run VMware just fine on a g3, but you're right that it won't boot 64 bit guests - shame as that scuppers 08r2 somewhat.

Anyway, that thing is running 2-3 "modern" guests max - I run that many on my home machine (i5 with 16gb ram) quite happily when I want to try something out or study

Foezjie · 6 days

What do you actually want to do/learn? You've suggested an old dinosaur that's 5 generations out of date or a glorified NAS. Servers aren't some amazing mystical hardware - if you want to learn how to set up servers you can do it just as effectively in a virtual environment on your own pc.

The reasons proper servers like that DL are built the way they are numerous - rack form factor for density, hot swap parts for continuity, redundant parts for reliability, fast disks and multiple CPUs to support hundreds/thousands of users. Nothing you're going to come across at home for learning is going to make use of that.

You really don't need to learn the hardware for any reasons I can't think of - not least because very few people will be running stuff like that any more. By the time you open the cover and go "oooh", maybe slide a PSU or a drive out and back in, you'll have learned pretty much zero and ended up with a very expensive (but effective, due to the weight) paperweight.

demosthenex · 6 days

I've only had problems with support on HP servers - dell have been fine. On the HPs were started using a good third part for support, works very well. Irrelevant to the point I was making and I'd give you the details if you were uk based, but worth looking at similar companies if you have problems with support.

Anyway from a cost perspective, the cheaper whiteboxes are obviously missing at least one thing the more expensive servers have or you'd never have posted originally - by the time you knock out the cost of support from the IBM/HP and add the missing bits to the white boxes, you'll probably find the cost difference comes down significantly.

hankinator · 6 days

Wasn't being sarcastic or anything - the differences there are the differences, theres not really any opinion on the matter! If you don't need the extra bits in enterprise or don't have a volume license agreement then get professional.

hankinator · 6 days

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7_editions

lawnmowerassassin · 6 days

Days? I did a rack of similar size in 4 hours yesterday afternoon.

iaindings · 6 days

Erm bit of both - I've always been quite general and broad. My title isn't the drive towards the network side though, just that my first 2 jobs were single site setups - 25 offices means theres more involved in networking. Saying that, I'm by no means narrow in the skillset there - virtualisation, windows server, exchange, telephony, security etc etc. I couldn't really get much broader without getting into coding...not something i want to do!

Nobody is teaching me anything where I am except myself. The CUCM is a good example - did a bit with it at my second job. Now at the stage of being able to do a complete build, some sophisticated call routing, SIP and ISDN gateway builds etc. That was all self taught through necessity.

So yeah, I could sit the exams pretty much straight away - I find there's always a bit of work to figure out the "exam way", even once you know the stuff in the real world.

I'd definitely like to get into somewhere else where I can learn more and start to specialise, i do get the feeling that being general will start to restrict my career options

ContextIsKing · 6 days

See I was going to suggest this and thought that would be the response. Why don't you want your pc running all the time, but you'll happily have another pc running 24/7 because you're going to call it a server?

Power? Same, if not less, depends which route you were thinking with the server. Noise? Likewise, same, if not less.

Spend the money on some more RAM and some quiet fans, install VMware server and be done with it.

demosthenex · 7 days

If you're upgrading the motherboard, I assume getting something high end with lights out management isn't going to be cheap. Would now not be a good time to think about putting a proper server in instead?

lawnmowerassassin · 7 days

Voice and data down separate wires? Huh?

Edit - looks like different kit on the bottom so guessing its non IP voice? It read like you were using 2 sets of switches...

iaindings · 8 days

The more I read about compellent the more I want it....

hepdd · 8 days

You need user OR device CALs, depending on which suits. In that scenerio, you would get 50 device CALs. You can mix and match and they arent enforced by the OS
RDP CALs are separate and in addition to Windows CALs - same deal as above. You can mix and match, but each TS host can only support device OR user licensing. But having 2 hosts, one for user and one for device CALs will work just dandy.

iaindings · 9 days

It is at the moment, but we're likely to be growing and the current array doesn't do anything fancy at all. In terms of features, the ds3000 is probably comparable to what we've got - Im wanting more out of the replacement and the knowledge that it can grow significantly

iaindings · 9 days

Wasn't really looking for an FC vs iSCSI discussion, more which FC solution to look at. I only mentioned iSCSI to explain why I wasn't considering it

iaindings

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