I have been busy analysing the data and system backups carried out at the Tiscali data center to audit it and replan it according to the new starategy in place at workplace site.
We have been working at Tiscali for a few days to configure the hardware and carry out pre-requisites like labeling the tapes, diagnosting any issues and updating the backup server.
The Backup technology used at data center is of high spec and utilises Dell PowerVault 132T Auotloader attached to the SAN (Storage Area Network). The autoloader can hold upto 23 tapes altogether with storage capacity of 500GB on each tape with the aid of 2:1 compression by default.
In principle it means we can backup upto 12TB. I have started working on the ideal strategy considering the resources available.
Nigell garett, had problems with the outlook configuration. He tends to saty away from office at client sites and therefore works offline most of the time. the problem he is facing is that the when he configures an email while working offline, he can not send/recieve his emails. In principal, when the user works offline but is connected to some sort of network the outlook should send any new configured emails as usual which would be actually send when next time you go online. With Nigell, all the emails which he configures while offline but connected to the network go into the outbox and do not get out of there even on doing send/recieve (F9). After going through his local outlook settings I managed to find that under send/recieve properties there is an option with edit the settings under which his outook was not ticked for offline access.
Another issue was that on his laptop he could never manage to disable any network connection.
It used to come up with an error window saying that more than one network protocol has been initiated by administrator or any other user which does not allow plug and play properties.
On looking for it and carrying out various diagnostics I found that there was nothing wrong with his network drivers or the hardware infact it was that there is service known as Digital Line Detect in windows which was not running creatind all these problems.
Lisa Bentham had ordered 3 new Dell servers. Two Dell PowerEdge 1950 and one 2950 for supporting various clients. The 1950's have windows environment while 2950 is a red Hat Linux machine. I along with Chris had to get them up and working on the rack and configure it to be used via KVM across the network with real Ip addresses and remote control sessions. WIndows configuration was straight forward but Linx was was a bit interesting and had something to learn about since it was the first time I was configuring a Linux machine.

Go live deadline for corporate email signature for all WorkPlace employees is tomorrow and many people have logged calls with inability of different sorts in editing their details using GALMod utility by Microsoft.
In order to resolve the issue, I managed to find a alternate way of allowing the end user to edit their personal details on the Active Directory. There are very few people who are aware of the free utility provided with Windows XP Professional called Address Book which can be accessed under Accessories. This allows you to view everyones details on the domain and by granting few of the privileges to the users through active directory it can even allow them to edit the details.
In the Active Directory, by going to the domain I could delegate control to the users to mange their personal information. this allowed the people having problems with GALMod utility to surpass the affect of the local outlook settings and edit their details.

Martin had received a 300MB zip file from a client (3GB after extraction) through FTP site and needed it to be unzipped. He could have unzipped locally from his machine but that would have meant that it would get extracted to temporary internet folders on his laptop first and thus create unwanted huge network traffic. So the idea was to extract it locally on the WEB Server. I gathered the connection details and using the Windows Server 2003 unzip tool did the extraction without affecting the network pipe.

Stuart Love has always had problems with his demo laptop due to conflicting services and chunks of applications being hosted on single operating system (Windows Server 2003). To overcome critical issues related to crucial business machine we have come up with a plan to implement virtual machines on a new high spec laptop using Virtual Server 2005 R2 which is a microsoft solution for virtualisation of operating systems.
It enables us to install several operating systems on a single host operating system without affecting the resources of the host operating system (hard drive, memory and optical drives) and each virtual operating behaves as if a different laptop.
For successful implement we have brought a Dell Latitude D820 machine with Duo core processor, 160Gb hard drive with 7200rpm and 4GB memory to allow machine to cope with several operating systems at an instance. All the virtual machines are supposed to be isolated from the internet to avoid any virus problems since this machine would be hosting our bespoke software applications. However virtual machines need to talk among each other and with the host and vice versa.

Andrew Burgess could not access his sales folder on file share which had some critical work. On investigating I managed to find that its been deleted and the last time he accessed it was around 10 days ago. I logged into the file server and first of all did search for that folder on not being able to find it I had to goto the backups and restore it.

The signature for development are now in pilot phase and it seems working fine till now.
In order to test the signatures the users need to write DISCLAIMER TESTING in the subject.

I am also auditing the phone lines across all our offices.

The incremental backup for Monday night did not run. On logging into the backup server it prompted with a error message to insert correct media for the job. On having a look at the online media, the slot for monday's media was empty and even after running the scan/inventory did not get detected.
I had to physically go the server and have a look at it. the tape had got stuck for some reason and just on ejecting and inserting back in I could manage to do the backups.

We have been working on migrating our WINS server onto a windows 2003 server. After migrating there have been problems.
One of the users claimed that he could not access the shares on some of servers and also could not see all the computers on the network. That meant that his machine is not pointing to the new wins server.
Now, to troubleshoot we had three options. One, that if the wins is locally set up on his laptop. Second, VPN is pushing out wrong wins or third that his laptop is connected to different domain which points to old wins server.
He was asked to run the command prompt and using ipconfig /all while logged in to vpn and find the wins ip adreess. As expected it was pointing to the wrong wins server.
It came out some changes be made on the vpn 3000 concentrator. I used webvpn to make the relevant changes. Under configuration>user management>groups>internal users group>genaral I changed the primary wins address to the new wins server and secondary to the old one.

To confirm it I connected to the vpn and did ipconfig to find the wins getting pointed out to the new ip address.

In view of auditing the ports on the patch panel in the server room I had to audit a list for all the ground ports across the building to ensure easy allocation of ports (network and phone ) in future.

I first noted down all the ports on the patch panel and then manually found the ground port each one is connected to on the patch panel itself. Secondly I would need to go to each ground port and find out if they are active, if not then mark them as inactive in the audit.