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• Building a PC for Work and play? [closed]

  - by Derek Organ

  Ok, Its been a long time since I build my own PC so I'm looking to get back into it again and build a new one. First off budget is about €800 excluding the monitor and windows 7 licence and mouse. (just bought a new g500) I plan on using my computer for work, lots of applications open at once but none particularly excessive (photoshop being the most demanding, mostly coding tools) I also use it for some gaming, e.g. COD, Starcraft etc. One thing I do want to do eventually is get a really good monitor with hight resolution and maybe 27" so the graphics card needs to be able to make best use of that. So a few questions 1) Is the bottle neck in performance mostly still the harddrives? 2) Aren't most processors e.g. i5 etc even i3 so far a head of other bottlenecks it makes litte difference the higher you go. Isn't the Graphics card dealing with heavy graphics so what really slows because of a slow CPU? So from this my thinking is to get a SSD drive as my primary drive for OS etc and have loads of memory e.g. 6-8GB and a decent mid level graphics card? It doesn't seem at my level worth spending much on CPU and any other parts really. I basic parts off the top of my head Case, Motherboard CPU SSD Drive SATA Drive Power Supply Memory Cooling (fan?) Graphics Card Network Card Keyboard DVD drive Mouse Windows Monitor Am I missing anything? Any helpful tips or general education much appreciated. Thanks, Derek

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• What are the most important aspects to consider when choosing a SAN for a small office virtualizatio

  - by Prof. Moriarty

  I am in the process of consolidating 6 physical servers running 6 different operating system flavors (don't ask) into two identical physical servers (Dell PowerEdge 2900), using the free VMware ESXi 4.0 platform. We will install an iSCSI SAN over a 1GbE network, and store all virtual machine images on the SAN. Each physical server would run 3 VMs, and in the case of a physical server failure, we would manually switch over the other 3. These are all internal servers, while important, they can tolerate some amount of downtime (say <1h) to keep cost and complexity associated with HA down. I now need to choose the SAN to be used for the setup, on a low budget. We currently have about 2TB of data, but of course I want to able to grow, do backups of VM snapshots on other drives and remove them to a different location, etc. So what I would like to know is: Which are the must have features for this setup, without which using a SAN is not worth it? We are mostly a Dell shop, so I have been looking at the EqualLogic PS4000E High Availability model. Any opinions, anecdotes, bad experiences with this model? (This is one of the few models which could accomodate our existing disks from the physical servers.) If you can recommend something that is not Dell, but it has better value, I would most definitely consider it. Caveats, things to look out for?

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• Private staff network within public network

  - by pianohacker

  I'm the sysadmin at a small public library. Since I got here a few years ago, I've been trying to set up the network in a secure and simple way. Security is a little tricky; the staff and patron networks need to be separated, for security reasons. Even if I further isolated the public wireless, I'd still rather not trust the security of our public computers. However, the two networks also need to communicate; even if I set up enough VMs so they didn't share any servers, they need to use the same two printers at the very least. Currently, I'm solving this with some jerry-rigged commodity equipment. The patron network, linked together by switches, has a Windows server connected to it for DNS and DHCP and a DSL modem for a gateway. Also on the patron network is the WAN side of a Linksys router. This router is the "top" of the staff network, and has the same Windows server connected on a different port, providing DNS and DHCP, and another, faster DSL modem (separate connections are very useful, especially as we heavily depend on some cloud-hosted software). tl;dr: We have a public network, and a NATed staff network within it. My question is; is this really the best way to do this? The right equipment would likely make my job easier, but anything with more than four ports and even rudimentary management quickly becomes a heavy hit on our budget. (My original question was about an ungodly frustrating DHCP routing issue, but I thought I'd ask whether my network was broken rather than asking about the DHCP problem and being told my network was broken.)

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• Free tiered storage automation in linux?

  - by NginUS

  I have a couple virtualized fileservers running in QEMU/KVM on ProxmoxVE. The physical host has 4 storage tiers with significant performance variances. They're attached both locally and via NFS. These will be provided to the fileserver(s) as local disks, abstracted into pools, and handling multiple streams of data for the network. My aim is for this abstraction layer to intelligently pool the tiers. There's a similar post on the site here: Home-brew automatic tiered storage solutions with Linux? (Memory - SSD - HDD - remote storage) in which the accepted answer was a suggestion to abandon a linux solution for NexentaStor. I like the idea of running NexentaStor. It almost fits the bill. NexentaStor provides Hybrid Storage Pools, and I love the idea of checksumming. 16TB without incurring licensing fees is a huge plus as well. After the expense of the hardware, free is about all my budget can handle. I don't know if zfs pools are adaptive or dynamically allocated based on load, but it becomes irrelevant since NexentaStor doesn't support virtio network or block drivers, which is a must in my environment. Then I saw a commercial solution called SmartMove: http://www.enigmadata.com/smartmove.html And it looks like a step in the right direction, but I'm so broke I'd be wasting their time to even ask for a quote, so I'm looking for another option. I'm after a linux implementation that supports virtio drivers, and I'm at a loss as to which software is up to it.

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• Self-Resetting Power Strips?

  - by Justin Scott

  We are about to deploy a number of secure kiosks into an environment where they may be prone to lightning strikes and power surges on a somewhat regular basis (southern Florida in a place where the existing electrical infrastructure is, shall we say, a bit out of date). Ideally we would use battery backups on each system, but it's not in the budget. We plan to use a standard power strip with a circuit breaker built-in to protect the computers, but management has asked if there is a power strip that can reset itself after the breaker has been tripped. I've looked around and wasn't able to find such a beast, and it seems to me that it would probably be a safety issue for such a product to exist (e.g. if something plugged into the strip is drawing a lot of current and trips the breaker, you wouldn't want that resetting itself to prevent a possible fire). Nevertheless, if anyone has experience with such a product or can point me in the direction of something that would allow the breakers to be reset automatically or remotely (we don't want to have to send someone to each kiosk every time there is a power surge) I would appreciate any tips.

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• Website Use Monitoring for 3 People

  - by linkedlinked

  I work in an IT startup with 2 partners, and I'm the programmer/IT guy -- in other words, the work horse. To make a long story short, I'm doing most of the work right now, while they spend all day on Facebook. That's OK, because they're paying my salary, but if the project fails, I'm sure they'll blame me for it (I'm doing my best to make sure that doesn't happen!), and I want some sort of recourse. I already have an app that blocks time-wasters on my local PC, and keeps logs of when the app is enabled (so I can say "I had Facebook blocked from 9am-5pm today.") Is there any way I can get a brief summary of the most heavily visited sites, split up by client PC? At the end of the month, I want to be able to say "You both load Facebook, on average, every 10 minutes. You spend hours a day on Youtube, and haven't opened up our bugtracker in weeks" and maybe have a nifty chart or graph to match it. We have a crappy D-Link router, and no IT budget. They are both on Windows Vista, I run Ubuntu Linux. I don't want to install any monitoring software on their PC, but I'm totally fine with, say, routing all the network traffic through my machine. I guess I can think of lots of ways to accomplish this (telnet into JSSH and list open tabs? log all the DNS requests, per-domain? even thinking of setting up a webcam on my desk and just keeping 5-minute snapshots...), I just don't really know where to start. Any advice is appreciated, thanks!

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• What laptop would be recommended for video-editing or transcoding to blu-ray?

  - by Rob

  I'm looking for a machine (has to be a laptop) reasonably fast enough to handle editing/transcoding/rendering to Blu-ray disc of full true HD 1080p (1920x1080) video from a Samsung R10 camcorder - MPEG4 25fps (not the Sony-Panasonic AVCHD format): To be able to browse through the footage (say, quarter screen is fine for monitoring) and do simple edits - cut out bad bits, add titles, fades, nothing too fancy To be able to burn the footage in 1920x1080p 24p (twenty-four) fps to blu-ray, probably don't mind if I have to leave it for a few hours, or even overnight, as long as its not still running in the morning or takes days. I ALREADY have an external USB 2.0 LG BE06LU10 blu-ray burner. Does quad core make much difference? Or would Dual-core suffice for the above? NVidia because of CUDA for increased speed. What software today can take advantage of this? Which graphics card do I need? So far I've found Dell/Alienware to be well-specified, having a 5yr old Dell laptop that still runs well, albeit slow by today's standards, gives me a good impression. My concerns are too much fan-noise and budget and some Dell Precision Laptops exceed 1500 pounds. Thoughts?

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• Using a Level 2 switch as a core switch

  - by imtech

  I have a small user base of about 20 people on at a time and spiking up to about 80 people during peak times. Most people (80+%) are connected over our Aruba managed wireless system. We have a Windows Domain. We have 3 24-Port switches all connecting back to a central 48-port switch where additional access ports, firewall, servers, and wireless controller all centrally connect back to. It's a flat network with dumb switches. I'm in the process of upgrading our infrastructure. Cisco pricing for switches is pretty high for us so I've been looking at HP Procurves which seem to be within our budget range. I want to eventually make use of 802.1x, SNMP, QoS for possible VOIP upgrades, VLAN to separate guest VLAN from authenticated users, and other more advanced features. PoE would be nice but that's probably too expensive for us. I was thinking of having our core switch be a Procurve 2610 and the rest of our switches that centrally connect to it be Procurve 2510s. A true and full blown level 3 switch is way out of our price range but a 2610 seems to be good enough for us. The 2610 does static routing which ought to be good enough for us but I'm in unfamiliar territory so I'm looking for any gotchas. Also, should all the switches be 2610s or just the core switch? Do I even need the 2610, can I just go with all 2510s? I'm new to VLANs as well so I'm not sure what it is I need but I would like an affordable infrastructure that won't need replacing 2-3 years down the line because I choose a product that was lacking.

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• What is the best way/Software to manage multiple short lived instances of virtual machines ?

  - by Newtopian

  Hi, We have a QA department that have to test our software on multiple combination of OS and DMBS. With Windows spewing out many different versions the combinatorial math of all this can be daunting. So we decided on visualizing our setups but so far it only displaces the problem. The cost of hardware is expensive and we need many different combination far exceeding your server capacity to deliver. Also, these instances are throw away, once the test is complete we no longer need it, furthermore to ensure proper test isolation we should start fresh from a new instance. Lastly we only need a small subset of these system online at any given time. What I am looking for is a way to manage inventory so that our QA staff can order instances to be put online as required and discarded once used. Instances are spawned from a pool of freshly installed systems with the appropriate combination ready to accept our software. It also should be possible for two or more people to start the same instance at the same time, though we could manage without this if it proves too complex to put in place. Finally our budget is pretty thin, we can probably make some purchases but ideally expenditures should be kept to a minimum. To summarize we should be able to : Bring instances online on demand. Ideally should offer queue and scheduling management Destroy instances on demand Keep masters in inventory but not online. Manage large inventory of VMs (30-100 maybe more) with small staff of users (5-10). Allow adding, deleting and changing instances from inventory (bring online, make changes and check back in, or create new and check in). Allow few long lived instances for support tools (normal VM server usage) Thanks for your answers

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• SharePoint extranet security concerns, am I right to be worried?

  - by LukeR

  We are currently running MOSS 2007 internally, and have been doing so for about 12 months with no major issues. There has now been a request from management to provide access from the internet for small groups (initially) which are comprised of members from other Community Organisations like ours. Committees and the like. My first reaction was not joy when presented with this request, however I'd like to make sure the apprehension is warranted. I have read a few docs on TechNet about security hardening with regard to SharePoint, but I'm interested to know what others have done. I've spoken with another organisation who has already implemented something similar, and they have essentially port-forwarded from the internet to their internal production MOSS server. I don't really like the sound of this. Is it adviseable/necessary to run a DMZ type configuration, with a separate web front-end on a contained network segment? Does that even offer me any greater security than their setup? Some of the configurations from a TechNet doc aren't really feasible, given our current network budget. I've already made my concerns known to management, but it appears it will go ahead in some form or another. I'm tempted to run a completely isolated, seperate install just for these types of users. Should I even be concerned about it? Any thoughts, comments would be most welcomed at this point.

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• Comprehensive solution for managing patches, event viewing, change management, inventory, etc

  - by Holocryptic

  I'm looking for a solution that incorporates most or all of the following: Patch Management, Server event viewing/tracking, AD change management, ticketing and internal/external kb, remote access - ability to shadow user sessions or create new ones, imaging, and inventory. Our environments contains Windows Servers and ESXi Hosts (We're not completely virtual, but we're moving that direction). Various Cisco and Linksys switches and firewalls. This is a tall order, and I don't know if it can be done on a reasonable budget. I've looked and found some questions on SF that deal with some of this: http://serverfault.com/questions/72015/active-directory-management-tools-for-medium-sized-forest-less-than-1000-users http://serverfault.com/questions/4021/are-there-any-tools-to-do-change-management-with-active-directory-group-policy http://serverfault.com/questions/21752/what-is-a-good-patch-update-management-server What I'm ideally looking for is a reasonably cheap solution that integrates the features into a central interface. We're a non-profit, so money is a limiting factor (the cheaper, the better; but we have a max of $15k). What we are trying to avoid is having to deal with multiple vendors, while maintaining scalability (we're creating more sites that we'll have to manage). Is this possible, or will we have to cobble together something to make it work for us?

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• Which upgrade path for disk IO bound postgres server?

  - by user41679

  Hi all, We currently have a Sun x4270 with 2xquad core Xeon Nehalmen 2.93ghz cores (16 threads), 72 gig of ram and 16 x 10k SAS disks split between the os raid 1, a partition for the Write Ahead Logs which is raid 10 and a partition for the database tables and indexes which is also raid 10, all xfs. I'm currently evaluating which path to go down in terms of upgrades. We'll be sharding the DB at some point soon, but for now I need to focus on hardware upgrades specifically. The machine is not CPU or memory bound at all at the moment, just IOWait is become an issue. The machine is mostly write access as we have a heavy caching layer. We're seeing about 300 write IOPS average on both the database partitions. We don't have any additional storage infrastructure like a Fiber Channel or ISCSI network. Budget isn't too much of a concern, something inline with the size of this server (i.e no $1m IBM machines) Space is ok on the DB side of things, we're running out obviously but there's also some reduction we can do. Additional space would be good though. My current thoughts are either: * ISCSI SAN, possible with 10Gbit network that has solid state acceleration. * FusionIO card / Sun F20 card (will the FusionIO card work in the Sun box? * DAS shelf (something like this http://www.broadberry.co.uk/das-direct-attached-storage-servers/cyberstore-224s-das) which a combination of 15k sas disks and some Intel X25-E drives for DB indexes etc) what would I need to put in the x4270 to add a DAS shelf? I think it's a SAS HBA card, do I have to use Sun's own card or will any PCI Express card work? Anything else??? what would you guys do from your experience? I appreciate it's a lot of questions, but I haven't expanded a DB machine for a number of years and the landscape has changed dramatically since then! Any advice or feedback would be very much appreciated. Let me know if there's anything else I can clarify. Thanks in advance!

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• Windows Server - share files without access for administrator

  - by Pawel

  We have a MS Windows Server 2008 R8 based server that is administrated by our IT department. We would like to achieve two things simultaneously: A folder on the server, containing several thousand files (new files added frequently) that is accessible to some ActiveDirectory users (e.g. board of directors) but is not accessible by IT department employees IT department employees still maintain rights to administrate the server, including installing new software and services We already checked some solutions: Using NTFS access rights. Unfortunately IT (members of "Administrators" group) can set themselves as new owners of the files and change the permissions so that they gain access to the files. Enabling EFS. Unfortunately even if you do not allow IT to access files, they still can disable EFS completely because they have administrative rights. Moreover as far as I know you have to manually add permissions for all users but the owner for each new file - very inconvenient. Creating a new role for the IT department that has all the privileges apart from taking ownership of files. Unfortunately if you're not a member of the Administrators group, you cannot install new software, no matter what privileges you add to the role. TrueCrypt - nice free encryption software, but with poor sharing capabilities. You can either mount an encryption container on the server (and then IT has access to its contents) or you mount them locally but only one user can mount it for writing. AxCrypt - free encryption software that enables file-by-file encryption on the server. There are some disadvantages though - you have to manually encrypt each new file added. The files have their extensions changes. You can only set one password for all files (so all users have to know this one password). Any other ideas? Our budget is limited so enterprise-class software from Symantec or PGP would probably be not an option.

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• Is this way of using Excel 2007 Pivot table for BI scalable ?

  - by Sim

  Hi all, Background: We need to consolidate sales data across the country to do analysis Our Internet connection/IT expertise/IT investment is not quite strong, therefore full BI solution is out of question I tried several SaaS BI solution (GoodData, ZohoReports) and while they're good, they seem not to fully support what we need We're looking at 'bout 2 millions record for every 2 months My current approach Our (10) sites currently gathers data from all their branches and consolidate them into 1 Excel file with Pivot table and embed source data In HQ, I will request 10 sites to send back those Excel files periodically We will import those Excel to our MSSQL server There will be a master Excel file, that will also have the same pivot table (as those came from site Excel file), and datasource is the MSSQL server More details For testing, I currently use MSSQL 2008 Express on my laptop So far, I imported our transactions for the past 2 months and there are 2 millions+ row in 1 table in MSSQL (we just use 1 table, corresponding to our common pivot table structure). DB size is ~ 600 MB In the master Excel file, if not including the source data, it's just < 10MB. Including the source data will increase the size to 60 MB (so I supposed Office 2007 automatically zip the data ?) I try using the Pivot (drag-and-drop fields) and the performance so far is OK (my laptop specs: C2D T7200, 3GB RAM, Windows XP) So my question is : If we're looking at full year transaction (roughly 15 millions rows in MSSQL 2008 Express, 3.6 GB in size), is there any issue with that 15 million rows in 1 table in SQL Express ? Is there any performance issue with the pivot table at that time ? Can it still embed the source data ? (I google-ed but didn't find the maximum size of source data Excel 2007 can embed) Any other suggestions on how we can better do this ? Given that we can't afford the full BI solution, any light-weight/budget/SaaS BI that you can recommend ? Thanks

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• Kindly guide me to buy a new laptop [on hold]

  - by Its me 007

  I am from India. I want to buy a new laptop. Shortlisted few but confused between which processor,Chip set and Graphics will be the best suited for my requirements. NOTE: NOT ABLE TO POST THE LINKS YOU WILL HAVE TO COPY PASTE IT. SORRY. 1) HP Pavilion 15-N004TX - 4th Gen CI5 - 4200U/4GB RAM/500 GB HDD/ 1GB Radeon Graphic - Rs 39990 www.homeshop18.com/hp-pavilion-15-n004tx-laptop-4th-gen-intel-core-i5-4200u-4gb-500gb-15-6-linux-silver-black/computers-tablets/laptops/product:30989197/cid:16317/ 2) Lenovo Essential G510 (59-398452) - 4th Gen Ci5 4200M/ 4GB/ 500 GB/Win8/2GB Graph ATI Sunpro 8570 - Rs 44969 www.flipkart.com/lenovo-essential-g510-59-398452-laptop-4th-gen-ci5-4gb-500gb-win8-2gb-graph/p/itmdp26eprwf5k5v?gclid=CMnh99GA2LoCFaRU4godNiUAGQ&semcmpid=sem_7847244212_laptopsnew_goog&tgi=sem%2C1%2CG%2C7847244212%2Cg%2Csearch%2C%2C24387103114%2C1t1%2Cb%2C%2Blenovo+%2Bg510%2F59+%2B398452%2Cc%2C%2C%2C%2C%2C%2C%2C2 3) HP Pavilion G6-2303TX Laptop (3rd Gen Ci5 3230M/ 4GB/ 500GB/ DOS/ 1GB Graph) - Rs 40500 www.flipkart.com/hp-pavilion-g6-2303tx-laptop-3rd-gen-ci5-4gb-500gb-dos-1gb-graph/p/itmdm6yzh4gr4cxd?pid=COMDM6YHWMGDRDEZ&ref=1d2b85fc-a03d-4c7d-844b-ec9e8dc95a81 4) HP Pavilion 15-E039TX Laptop (3rd Gen Ci5 3230M/ 4GB/ 1TB/ Win8/ 2GB Graph) - Rs 46690 www.flipkart.com/hp-pavilion-15-e039tx-laptop-3rd-gen-ci5-4gb-1tb-win8-2gb-graph/p/itmdn4d9wykhdcpz?pid=COMDN4CZGFMGJNTN&ref=1d2b85fc-a03d-4c7d-844b-ec9e8dc95a81 Now I am confused between: Which Processor and chipset is best? How much graphic card is enough? (Not a gamer) Is any of this laptop future proof i.e. it should at least support upcoming latest programming softwares which eats more processor and memory. Laptop will be mainly used for multiprocessing.It should be at least capable for following: Visual Studio 2012 and the upcoming versions for at least 4 years SQL server 2008 R2 and above Sharepoint Blend Photoshop Kindly suggest. If anyone know any good laptop with good configuration in the 50k budget kindly suggest. Thanks in advance.

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• Mac mini simple customized, Mac mini server or other?

  - by microspino

  I'm in front of a big IT choice for my little office and I need some advice. We have 5 users, 1 super user, 1 HP500 DesignJet Plotter, other 4 laser printers, 1 HP Fax/Print/Scan/Copy machine. All the clients are XP Sp3 boxes. We would like to: centralize and share 90Gb of files using a Dropbox (this way we will have LAN sync of local working directories + internet backup + access our files wherever we are). centralize our plotter, printers and fax machine backup all the workstations share outlook calendar and tasks run 24x7 saving some energy Of course this setup It's just the first step to a more serious and creative network management of our office, so we are open to new ideas. The budget vary from 400€ to 900€, we are not tech gurus but at least one of us is a power user close to become a geek. I've read some articles on macminicolo about a mac mini either normal or with snow leopard server. I heard about Windows Home Server too on the lifehacker website but I'm in a sort of analysis - paralysis can You help me?

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• Road Warrior VPN Setup

  - by wobblycogs

  I apologise up front for the rather open ended nature of this question but I've got well out of my depth and could really do with some pointers. I need to set up a road warrior VPN solution which will allow our customers to securely access a number of services we provide for them. Customer machines will be running a variety of Windows versions from XP onwards with a variety of patch levels. Typically they will connect from the clients main offices but not always. It is safe to assume that all clients will be behind NATs but we may occasionally see a connection that isn't NAT'ed. Typical connection situation is therefore: Customer Laptop -- Router (NAT) -- Internet -- VPN Server + Firewall -- Server (Win 2008 R2, Non-routable IP) There will initially be a dozen or so people that could connect but that will grow quickly to around 100. It's unlikely that we'll see that many concurrent connections though, I imagine our total VPN throughput would be <50Mbps peak. What are my options for setting this up? I've been trying to set up a system like this using a MikroTik router for a few days but have struggled to get it working correctly, particularly with NAT'ed clients. I've had a quick look at OpenVPN and liked what I saw but I think it's unlikely our customers IT departments would allow the client to be installed. Finally I've looked at the Cisco ASA range but I'm on a fairly tight budget so this is less preferable but it looks like it would work pretty much out of the box. My fall back position is to connect the server directly and use the provided VPN + Firewall facilities but that is far from ideal as the number of servers is likely to grow over time.

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• How To Replace Laptop HDD Without Losing Data?

  - by Ishan

  Hello, I recently went to Dell Service center and they tell that HDD is faulty and needs to be replaced. I have a Studio 1457 laptop with 500 GB HDD and don't want to lose the data(purchased in May 2010, still under warranty). I have searched a bit and I think it may be best to use a disk imaging software for this task. However, I don't know about a good software. I have following steps in mind: Get a 1 TB External HDD. Make an image of existing 500 GB HDD and store data on external disk. Install new HDD and install a brand new Windows copy and then install the software on it. Using the same software I used to make image, restore the old HDD image on new one. However, I have some questions in mind. First, is this possible? Second, I live in a country where piracy is a big issue and I am sure the support executive who will come to change HDD will have a pirated copy. But I have genuine Windows 7 Pro and don't want to lose it. Now, Dell does not supply and OS disks, so I can't install it on new HDD! If I follow above steps, which version of Windows 7 will be retained? One in the image(authentic) or one in the new HDD(pirated). I am ready to purchase a good software for this task and my budget is $50-60. Since laptop is under warranty, new HDD will be free. One last thing, I have created a Windows Migration file whose size is 70 GB. Can it be used to move from Windows 7 Pro to Windows 7 Pro?(In case I get a genuine copy of Windows 7!) Any other method to save all the data? Thanks in advance.

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• Move OS from RAID5 array to RAID 1 arrays

  - by Antoine

  I want to give a last boost to my old ProLiant ML350 G5 server which just needs to be reliable for a few more year only ! With a defined budget of about 1500$ (I do not have more), i plan to replace the CPU (+ adding a second one), the battery cache of my raid controller (E200i), double the RAM, and change all hard drives. I have 7 HDD (SAS 10krpm, 72Gb) + 1 spare in RAID5, and my system is all FULL (no empty tray, full disks). in my current RAID5 array, I have 2 partitions: - 1 OS partition, 20Gb - 1 data partition, 350 Gb I plan to replace these 8 disks with : - 2 x 300Gb SAS 15krpm in RAID 1 (= 1 partition for OS) - 2 x 2Tb SATA 7.2krpm in RAID 1 (= 1 partition for DATA) My biggest constraint is that I have only 01 day to upgrade my server. Therefore, I'm looking for cloning all my files (OS + data partition) to my new arrays, i.e : - the OS partition shall be cloned to the RAID1 "2x300Gb array" - the data partition shall be cloned to the RAID1 "2x2Tb array" My second problem is that I need to physically remove all the old hard drives before inserting the new ones. I'm running Windows Server 2003 R2, and even if MS support will expire soon, I cannot buy a new licence and spent time in configuration. Obviously, with 1500$, I cannot also buy a new server that I could start configuring from now ! Thought about ASR (NTBackup), but I have no floppy drive (and do not really want to invest in one !) Thought about a clonezilla clone, and read this interesting link : Windows Server 2003 - move C: partition to a new SAS disk , but i'm not so confident in using Clonezilla with RAID5. What should be the best option to quickly and easily (if possible!) "copy/paste" my OS (so no need to reinstall and reconfigure all) and DATA / programs / services, etc... ? Thanks for your comments

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• What to look for in a switch with LAN/WAN verses an iSCSI SAN?

  - by Luke

  I'm setting up a VMWare ESXi 5 environment with 3 server nodes. Dell recommended 2x Force10 S60 switches shared (iSCSI SAN, LAN/WAN). The S60 switches are extremely powerful. They have 1.25 GB of buffer cache, < 9us latency. But they are very expensive (online price ~$15k per switch, actual quote a little less). I've been told that "by the book" you should at least have 2 internal switches for SAN, and 2 switches for LAN/WAN (each with a redundant). I know some of the pros and cons of each approach. What I'm wondering is, would it be more cost effective to disjoin the SAN from LAN with less expensive switches? The answer to this question highlights what I should be looking for in a switch for the SAN. What should I be looking for in a LAN/WAN switch, in comparison to the SAN? With the above linked question for the SAN: How is buffer latency measured? When you see 36 MB of buffer cache, is that shared or per port? So 36 MB would be 768kb or 36MB per port? With 3 to 6 servers how much buffer cache do you really need? What else should I be looking at? Our application will be heavily using HTML5 websockets (high number of persistent connections). The amount of data being sent is small; Data sent between client <- server isn't broadcasted (not a chat/IM service). We will be doing some database reporting too (csv export, sums, some joins). We are a small business and on a budget. We'd probably only be able to spend no more than $20k on switches total (2 or 4).

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• Migrating Linux user data to Windows profiles automatically

  - by scott ryan

  I have what seems to be an incredibly simple problem with a very simple solution but I'm having some trouble connecting dots. I have an aging server running Ubuntu Server which hosts roaming profiles. I am switching to a Windows Server 2012 DS shortly. Users used to be named firstinitial.lastname and we are switching to firstname.lastname. I need to transfer things like favorites, documents, etc. from the roaming Linux profile to the user's local Windows profile. So, the way I think it'd work is by using a login script. I think I'd use a script to mount the Linux server's /home for each user, then do copy to various paths (documents, pictures, etc.). But, how do I automate this for each user that logs in? I'm working with a nonprofit, so doing this by hand would probably be out of their budget. I'm open to suggestions, though. What I want is basically Windows Easy Migration, but I'm fairly certain that won't work under Wine... (Kidding, I promise). Thanks!

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• Windows Server - share files without access for administrator

  - by Pawel

  We have a MS Windows Server 2008 R8 based server that is administrated by our IT department. We would like to achieve two things simultaneously: A folder on the server, containing several thousand files (new files added frequently) that is accessible to some ActiveDirectory users (e.g. board of directors) but is not accessible by IT department employees IT department employees still maintain rights to administrate the server, including installing new software and services We already checked some solutions: Using NTFS access rights. Unfortunately IT (members of "Administrators" group) can set themselves as new owners of the files and change the permissions so that they gain access to the files. Enabling EFS. Unfortunately even if you do not allow IT to access files, they still can disable EFS completely because they have administrative rights. Moreover as far as I know you have to manually add permissions for all users but the owner for each new file - very inconvenient. Creating a new role for the IT department that has all the privileges apart from taking ownership of files. Unfortunately if you're not a member of the Administrators group, you cannot install new software, no matter what privileges you add to the role. TrueCrypt - nice free encryption software, but with poor sharing capabilities. You can either mount an encryption container on the server (and then IT has access to its contents) or you mount them locally but only one user can mount it for writing. AxCrypt - free encryption software that enables file-by-file encryption on the server. There are some disadvantages though - you have to manually encrypt each new file added. The files have their extensions changes. You can only set one password for all files (so all users have to know this one password). Any other ideas? Our budget is limited so enterprise-class software from Symantec or PGP would probably be not an option.

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• i7 Windows 7 laptop or Macbook Pro 15" (For making 3D model and Animation)

  - by sppdhs

  Hi everyone, I'm thinking of buying a new laptop as my current one will be 5 years old next year and it currently gives me a blue screen everytime I run a heavy software to make 3D models and animation. Question is: Should I buy Macbook Pro or a Windows 7 laptop? I tried to research and some say that Windows would be better, especially because you can buy a very high spec laptop with cheaper price. While some other say Macbook Pro is the better choice as it can run bootcamp with windows 7 100% performance on every software even though it's a mac. Is this true? Which one is actually better? Btw, the software that I usually use is 3Ds Max, Maya, and ZBrush. To note as well, I have never used a Mac before. I've checked around some stores and budget wise, I'll need around AU$3000+ to buy a Macbook pro, and AU$2000+ to buy a windows laptop. Quite a big difference in price range. Thanks in advance for your help.

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• Run a script on user connection on the VM host

  - by Scott Chamberlain

  I have a server running a Virtual Desktop Managed Pool, what I would like to do is when a user logs in I would like a script to check the number of available VMs and if below a threashold add additional VMs to the pool. The script to check the load and add to the pool is not the problem, I have that already figured out: $collectionName = "Test1"; $rdvh = "vmHost.example.com"; $minAvailableVMs = 2; Import-Module RemoteDesktop; $pool = Get-VirtualDesktopCollection -CollectionName $collectionName; $availableVMs = $pool.Size - ($pool.Size * $pool.PercentInUse / 100); $status = Get-VirtualDesktopCollectionJobStatus $collectionName #only add new servers if we are below the threashold and in the JOB_COMPLETEED state if($availableVMs -lt $minAvailableVMs -and $status.Status -eq [Microsoft.RemoteDesktopServices.Management.VirtualDesktopCollectionJobStatus]::JOB_COMPLETED) { Add-RDVirtualDesktopToCollection -CollectionName $collectionName -VirtualDesktopAllocation @{"$rdvh" = 1} } The problem I am having is, how do I run the above script on the Virtualization Host/Connection Broker/Some other server when a user connects?. I don't think it would be appropriate to run this as a logon script inside the VM, I think there is a way to do this on the management side but I don't know the new scripting interface in Server 2012 R2 well enough to know which commandlets I should look for to schedule this. EDIT: I know System Center is perfect for this but I do not have a license and was denied when I asked for it to be added to the budget.

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• Generalized strategy for file server virtualization in Xenserver

  - by Jamie

  I'm not shopping as much as I'm looking for some guidance on good idea / bad idea strategies. I'm sure I'm not in the "best practices" budget range. Currently, I have 3 dell poweredges running xenserver in a pool. Each node has a ubuntu file server, serving about 6TB. One is the primary, the other two are rsync targets for backup. The 6TB is stored on their respective local storage disks as an LVM of 3x2tb virtual disks. The fileserver VM disks are also stored on the node local disks. Each node also runs a smattering of light-weight VMs for web, development, windows VMs, and stuff like that. Several of those VM's disks reside on a QNAP NAS to play with live migration. These VM's are often clients of the primary file server (like all the mail, web content, user files are stored on the file server, not on the mail, web, and samba VMs). This all works fine, and is a major step up for us. The downside is that the QNAP is a single point of failure. And the only thing the QNAP is doing is serving migratable VM images, not client data. Someday the poweredge local arrays will be full, and we will have to reinvent ourselves again. Is it wise to have heavywieght vms (like the fileserver, with its 6+ TB disks) on a SAN or NAS? Would it be better to keep the VMs lightweight, have the VM images on a SAN or NAS, and use 2 or more NAS act as NFS-serving file appliances? A hybrid SAN/NAS that can serve iscsi for images and NFS for the client vms? It seems like live-magration would be a misnomer if you have to migrate a fileserver with its entire 6+ TB disk. I recognize there are plenty of ways to skin the cat. We've already skinned it a few ways. What makes sense?

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