January 2011 - Blind-sysadmins - lists.hodgsonfamily.org

Telephony systems
by Andrew Hodgson 14 Nov '12

14 Nov '12

Hi all, Our current Call Manager 4.x servers are creaking under their age, and we are looking at replacing this either with a new Cisco telephony system or a completely new system altogether. The system has to use IP as the connection to the handsets, as we don't want to add in more cables. Has anyone any experience in deploying a new Call manager setup, or a similar telephony system, and how was the accessibility? Thanks. Andrew.

9 30

let's talk Backup Exec
by Ryan Shugart 21 Dec '11

21 Dec '11

Hey everyone: I just got a promotion at work, and with the goodness of a promotion comes more responsibilities. I'm now in charge of our backup infrastructure. We run Backup Exec 12.5, and have 16 or so media servers in various branch offices around the world. While Backup Exec used to be very accessible, over the last two versions accessibility seems to have gone into something of a decline, I already use scripts just to read the main table of jobs, and might need more just to get around the scheduling window so I can actually schedule a job. I'd consider the rest of the program accessible but clunky, tabbing doesn't always bring you where you think it will, on some screens tab order seems to be dynamic. Backup Exec also has an odd way of bringing up alert windows and grabbing your focus, even when you tell it specifically not to. While clunkyness is OK on one server, when you have fifteen individual servers to manage and no way to do it in a centralized fashion clunkyness is less acceptable. This is also less than a quarter of my new responsibilities as well. The current admin has the remote desktop console setup with all the Backup Exec servers in his favorites, stays logged into each server with a Backup Exec window open, and flicks from screen to screen and can easily glance at the output from each job. For us screen reader users, that doesn't work well. I've already got e-mail alerts set up and am using some Outlook rules to sort failure jobs out from successes, but was wondering if there's anything else I can be doing? I'd think people in really large environments with hundreds of media servers aren't logging into each server on a daily basis, so there has to be better ways to handle this. Any ideas? Thanks. Ryan

6 14

Router shopping
by Barry Toner 30 Jan '11

30 Jan '11

Afternoon all, I've pretty much decided that it's most likely the routers the problem here. Looking at the DrayTek range is making my mouth water. Two I'm looking at are here http://www.seg.co.uk/ and here http://www.seg.co.uk/ Both look very nice. I especially like that the Router can double up as a NAS. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to support NTFS, just FAT16/32. According to what I'm reading here though you can use drives larger than 32GB with FAT32? http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_maximum_partition_you_can_partition_FAT32 Do any of you folks know what the maximum capacity is? EG Any point hoping a 2TB drive can be used as formatted with FAT32? Cheers, Barry Soon to be broke!

3 9

Network troubleshooting
by Barry Toner 24 Jan '11

24 Jan '11

Hi all, I've been pulling my hair out for the past week and a half. Suddenly our bandwidth dropped off. I'm on a 20MB connection and normally get 1.5 to 2.4MB/s download from fast servers like the BBC and Sendspace.com where I have a premium membership. I began to notice speeds of 93K, 21K, and on one freaky moment 4Bytes! After 6 phone calls to the lovely outsourced call centre. During which, I explained the drastic reduction in speed. Coupled with the fact that i had noticed I was losing packets. One 1st line Agent was able to see when he pinged my cable modem this was indeed happening. That it wasn't my hardware or the 6 computers I had at home. That I did know a tiny bit about computers and had confirmed that not only there was no hijackers on my WIFI, but that it didnt' make a difference whither I had my Netgear Router in the mix or was directly connected to the modem. Then after my ISP botched and ordered me two replacement modems the speeds flew back up to normal and life went on. Today i noticed during mudding lag had started again. I also noticed using Ventrilo I was getting insane ping rates. In the thousands. I started some ping tests again. pinging on wifi, 36 pings, 28 recieved. min - 22ms, max 480ms, avg 46ms Is this normal and should I expect a loss of packets on WIFI when i'm getting full signal, (as I was sitting beside the router, have all my WIFI gear bar the IPhone as N Adaptors). I did lose approx 1 packet out of the standard 4 packet Windows ping test when connected to the Router wired, and the modem wired, this afternoon. I'm trying to figure out how to establish what is the problem and minimise my own expense in the process. I can take a hit on time but I dont' want to go out and buy a new router just to test. Should I buy all new Ethernet cables? Demand my ISP send an Engineer out to check the cable box, and pay the £30 fee if all's fine? Is there any decent networking troubleshooting tools you all recommend? At first I thought was because I was messing around with creating my own 2K8R2 server networking at home, then i realised it wasn't just the Server and the one laptop who was using it as it's Domain and DNS that were having problems. Web Pages were/are loading slowly. I've ruled out viral and malware infaltrations. I know no WIFI encryption is full proof but I'm using WPA2, TKIP, ASE, MAC Address Filtering, hiding the SID, checked the client tables on the router to see if any non-recognised addresses are popping up. I'm at a loss as what more to do and don't want to go back to the ISP without as much concrete evidence as possible. BTW. I know they do throttle but this is for peer to peer s'fers between set hours. They say streaming, and browsing will not be effected. It's Virgin Media in the UK. Cheers as this is driving me mental! Barry

8 37

JFW 12.x and event viewer
by Andrew Hodgson 19 Jan '11

19 Jan '11

Hi, Not sure if this is related to JFW 12, but is anyone else seeing that when viewing the event logs on a Windows system that JFW is no longer reading the actual contents of the event text? I am having to copy and paste this into a temporary Notepad session at the moment. This always used to work and on the same system as well. Thanks. Andrew.

1 0

Microsoft Management Summet 2011
by Ryan Shugart 07 Jan '11

07 Jan '11

Greetings: To the other Windows admins out there, I was wondering if anyone else was going to MMS this year or had ever gone? Looking at the web site (http://www.mms-2011.com) it looks like there will be quite a few presentations I'll benefit from on the systems management track, but before making my case to the boss I'm trying to figure out the best way to handle such a thing as a blind person. I've heard its very fast paced, and it'll be in a rather large venue. Chances are that I'd be the only one there from my company. So, was just curious if anyone's tried this before and how it worked out? Thanks. Ryan

1 0

Microsoft Management Summet 2011
by Ryan Shugart 07 Jan '11

07 Jan '11

Greetings: To the other Windows admins out there, I was wondering if anyone else was going to MMS this year or had ever gone? Looking at the web site (http://www.mms-2011.com) it looks like there will be quite a few presentations I'll benefit from on the systems management track, but before making my case to the boss I'm trying to figure out the best way to handle such a thing as a blind person. I've heard its very fast paced, and it'll be in a rather large venue. Chances are that I'd be the only one there from my company. So, was just curious if anyone's tried this before and how it worked out? Thanks. Ryan

1 0

Truely unattended win 7 install?
by Ben Mustill-Rose 07 Jan '11

07 Jan '11

Hey all, Was just wondering if anyones been able to make a truely unattended windows 7 install? I don't mind about the partition selection, but even if I automate everything that I can using vLite, I still have to confirm some things durin the install such as regional information. What seems strange is that the key sequences don't seem to be consistant for the stuff that isn't automated across different installs which is making it pretty hard for me to do this on my own. Asa side note, when ever I try and get vLite to skip the user creation screen, the iso that it makes won't ever install due to install.wim being corrupted. I'm using a windows 7 ultimate oem disk at the moment which seems to work just fine if the install is attended. Any thoughts are welcome; I was able to make a unattended disk that worked perfectly fine when I was installing the RC, but I just can't get it to work now. Cheers, Ben.

1 0

windows 7 not respecting administrators group server 2003
by Nehemiah Hall 07 Jan '11

07 Jan '11

I'm at a loss here. I'm a member of the administrators group on a server 2003 domain. We just put several windows 7 machines onto the domain, but none of them will allow me to make any changes that require UAC permission. It doesn't give me any error, it just keeps giving the same UAC prompt, asking for username and password. Suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks. Nehemiah Email/MSN: nrh(a)n-republic.net Twitter: miahtech Skype: trekky-techie AIM: NehemiahRepublic

3 4

Newbe Server 2008 R2
by Barry Toner 05 Jan '11

05 Jan '11

Hi folks, Let me say first of all I've little to no experience of this. Other than a year 3 years back assisting in a large Software House with Server 2003. I've install Server 2008 R2 at home. I've assigned it as a DC and install Active Directory. I'm flying by the seat of my pants and don't know what i'm doing. I want to be able to log-on to the Active Directory service using my laptop. Poked around in Active Directory and I created a Computer object under tx.r2.com (which is the address I gave my DC). I then created a User Object for myself. Now what? Is there tutorials or something? I can of course sift through the Microsoft documentation, but this is such an massive product and already I am drowning. Help! Cheers, Barry.

3 11