WebTrends offers software like this. We outsource a lot of our web stuff and one of our providers runs WebTrends and our people who like looking at pretty pictures really seem to like it. I have never installed or configured their software so I can't speak for ease of use, but the end user reports are easy to navigate. IIRC you can download a demo from their site and play with it. They do seem to have a demo report you can look at and see if this meets your needs.
I poked around microsoft's site and found this kb article about building server appliances, which may or may not meet your needs. I did notice that the hardware requirements for w2k pro, w2k server, w2k advanced server, xp, and xp pro all listed VGA display adapters as a requirement. I *think* that you may be able to get win2k datacenter servers without VGA boards, but those boxes are all designed around the vendors hardware so it would probably be pretty easy for them to drop VGA support if they didn't want it. I did think it was funny that Microsoft Services for Unix was a requirement for installing their Server Appliance Kit. I kind of expected them to use CIFS instead of NFS for some reason..... If I were you I'd just throw some cheap VGA board in there and not plug a monitor in. That way you can remote admin it with VNC or Terminal Services or pc anywhere(ugh!) or whatever, but if you run into "big trouble" you can always plug in a monitor/keyboard/mouse. Win2k is ROCK SOLID so I don't think you'll ever have problems with it:)
I haven't personally had any big problems with the PERC boards, although friends and co-workers always seem to have had bad experiences with them. I've had really good luck with IBM ServeRAID boards. We have quite a few of these in production boxes and haven't had any problems with them(the IBM hard drives on the other hand...plenty of failures there). If your RAID problems are big enough that you're willing to put up lots of $$$ to get rid of them you could look at buying a SAN or NAS. That way, in theory, you could have the vendor install and maintain the disk for you. Generally they seem to do an okay job. I must mention however, that I have seen a vendor make an oops and drop power to an array while trying to fix a power supply problem. That took some time to get back online because the CE out on site wasn't familiar with that product and ended up having to get a senior CE to drive out and fix it. All and all it seems like the big boys(IBM, EMC, Sun, STK, etc) are pretty good about keeping uptimes in the 99.99%+ range(i guess that's what you give them the big bucks for).
The most common way for netops to find wireless APs is to look at arp tables for MAC addresses that are in ranges that are known to be used by wireless APs. If your AP supports using a localy administered MAC address just change the MAC to something else that is not in a known wireless AP range. As convenient as 802.11b is, I do understand why many organizations do have policies against them(or strict configuration requirements). It really sucks to have to explain to your CIO that some people in a van out on the street jumped onto your internal networks poked around. Although, in a university environment I don't see how some wireless APs make the network any less secure, I mean you usually just walk in a library or computer lab or a dorm room and hop onto their networks.
The Morpheous people always seem to say that they just took the core as a black box, skinned it and released it. I find it hard to believe that they were able to do this without at least one or two tech people taking a peek at how it works. There must be someone technical that knows the protocol and know the app who can shed some useful light on the situation.
A Citrix solution may be appropiate in your case. You do need to realize that the servers and server admin time are going to be expensive up front and you need to do some analysis to ensure that this will really save you money over time. I have seen people implement a Citrix solution only to find out 18 months later that 50% of their users need to run some app that requires a fat client, so they end up with half their users having uber powerful PCs. Even if you think that some of your users will end up with 'big' PCs anyhow Citrix systems can still save you money. If you have a large user base the ability to push changes to all your users enviroments easily can save you tons of money. I have seen environments where users have fat clients but still use Citrix for a core set of apps such as Office and an email client and the IT departments were claiming large cost savings becuase they were able to upgrade their entire user base to the latest version of office by only touch the few servers in their Citrix server farm. Although, if you're looking at these benifits only, keep in mind that if you have a good implementation of SMS or a similar product you can use that to effect large scale app changes also. The biggest factor that determines the success of a Citrix implemenation, IMHO, is the skill with which the servers are configured and maintained. I've seen what should have been easy systems crash and burn due to user complaints about constant downtime, and I've seen people try to run apps that I never thought would work in a Citrix environment work great because of the expertise of the admins and the careful planning and deployment of the infrastructure to support the servers.
I've worked with a few people who weren't willing to comment on current or former employees. I think that a lot of that has to do with working in the public sector though, people tend to be a little sue happy. One thing I have noticed is that people who are hesitant to comment seem much more likely to comment on people who didn't perform/they didn't get along with/etc, although the conversations usually went like this: "What did you think of Joe?" "I can't really talk about him" "Well, you did supervise Joe for a few years didn't you?" "Well yes, but I don't really think I should say anything about him" "Was he a good employee?" "All I'm going to say is that yes he worked here and yes he worked for me. Take that to mean what you will, but I can't really say more than that" "Ooooh, so you had problems" "Sorry, I can't really say more than that, please talk to our HR people if you want anything else regarding Joe"
I wish that hadn't used those damn external power bricks. It did make the unit smaller, but I kept on loosing the power supply. It wasn't the easiest thing in the world to find a suitable PS for that box. I think that most of the downtime on the netwinder I had was due to lost power supplies.
I would recommend getting a cisco catalyst 6513 switch with the following configuration:
1 cat 6513 w/redundant ps 2 supervisor2/msfc2 cards 2 switch fabric module-2 cards 4 16 port fabric enabled gig-e cards 1 network analysis module 1 ids blade 3 48 port 10/100 power over ethernet enabled blades
if you can get two ports to the campus backbone i'd recommend using both of the ports and getting the campus IT folks to provision them off of separate switches and configure hsrp for you, then you could get another 6513 configured similarly to the one above and have a good sense of redundancy. One 6513 configured as the one above is should run you >$100k. If this doesn't fall in the 'cheap' catagory you could look at getting a cisco 3550-12T switch. this guy has 12 10/100/1000 ports and comes with basic ip routing functionality. its only $10k or so i think. If that is still too expensive you could look at something like a 2621 router, which has 2 100mbps ports. With the 2621 or the 6513 solution you could also add voice modules. You could have your local teleco provision a few PRIs to your dorm and become the campus CLEC or something. If you teamed up with other students at other colleges you could put voice gateways at a bunch of colleges and use the fat pipes between them to do toll bypass and give students across the world cheap long distance. If you went with the 6500 you'd also have a permanent space heater in your dorm. If you need an even cheaper solution i'd recommend using a linux box or something of that nature, not only will it be a fun learning experience, but it will be dirt cheap. oh, and i'll give you a cookie if you try to order the 6513 with WS-X6369-THC(that's the integrated bong option....ooh...you'll want the WS-X6569-THC, that's the fabric enabled bong option).
Depending on your backup and recovery needs you may want to look at using a SAN or NAS that has the ability to do snapshots or point in time copies of your data. All you'd need to do then is pause or stop your db engine, snap the filesystem and restart the db engine. This one approch you can take to expand your backup window. This can also let you take advantage of resources that may not be available during your normal backup window. For example, we have a storage tek tape silo that is heavily used at night by our legacy systems for various production jobs. That same silo is idle much of the day time hours. We have a NAS that supports snapshotting(a netapp filer) so we can pause our db engine at 2AM, snaphot the filesystem, and restart the db engine. Then the next day, when we have lots of available time on the silo we can dump it to tape. This also gives us quick restore capability, if we need it. For example, if the DBA makes a boo-boo and needs to restore the db they can stop the db engine, rollback to the snapshot from 2AM and restart the db engine. This takes very little time compared to doing a restore from tape. But, don't just snapshot the data because if the building burns down you'd be SOL. If you really need quick restore times and tape is still too slow you can look at replicated db's or replicated file systems. If you give your friendly local network appliance, veritas, IBM, sun, hp, compaq, EMC, or auspex sales person a call they would probably be more than happy to talk with you about various products that support some form of snapshotting, rollback, replication, clustering, etc. You may also be able to cut down the amount of data that you need to backup nightly. A lot of times in large databases there is tons of static data, for example if you have a a large GIS database with lots of satellite imagery you may find that you only need to backup the imagery quarterly or yearly instead of nightly.
IBM Netstations should be able to do X, ICA, and perhaps RDP(I haven't used one in a year or so, but I'd imagine that they'd have RDP supporty by now). At one point we had about 50% of our office running on these. Over time our users' needs have changed so we've migrated away from these, but some of the other departments in my organization have a decent install base of IBM Netstations. The only gripe we had about them when we used them was the video output quality was less than great. This has probably been fixed by now though. Another option, that I have zero experiance with, might be Sun's SunRay or whatever there thin client is called. I think you can get an ICA client for it(though I have my doubts about being able to find an RDP client) and it does support X. The SunRay may have a fan also, which violates the no moving parts idea. IIRC a lot of the 'Windows' thin clients(Wyse Winterms, etc) have a fan, so you may be stuck with fans anyhow. One thing I have noticed about thin clients(and cheap 'PCs' like the Compaq iPac) is that even though they may have no, or very few, moving parts that the failure rates are still about the same as a full PC. They always seem to have cheap power supplies that give out, especially if you have crappy power at your location). You didn't mention the size of this rollout, but if it is a large one you should take a good look at the management options for the clients you buy. Some have great centralized manament options and some have none. This can make a big difference when you find you need to upgrade firmware or change the configs on a bazillion clients. Good luck with your rollout!
I'm suprised to see the AC-130 in the Top Searches related to the war on terrorism. Its not the most common aircraft and it seems like many people haven't heard of them. It kinda suprised me that they haven't been using any A-10s in the war. I guess that range to target would have cut down a bit on their loiter time since we didn't exactly have any close airfields. Hrmmm...maybe they could make an AC-130 with a GAU-8/A Avenger cannon...heheheh...what impractical fun that could be!:)
There are pros and cons of both FH and DS spread spectrum. The general gist of it is that FH is cheaper and slower vs DS which is faster, more expensive, and sucks more juice. A quick Google search returns some interesting pieces on the advantages/disantvantages of DS and FH spread spectrum including this article on wireless-nets.com.
If a cordless phone is killing your wireless connection the problem is usually that the phone is a frequency hopping spread spectrum device, which don't play well with 802.11b networks. Here's a snippit from a Cisco Wireless LAN FAQ about their Aironet line of products(they're the Cisco 802.11b APs and cards):
----
Q. Would another vendor's frequency hopping (FH) equipment sitting next to our direct sequence (DS) equipment have any negative effect?
A. Yes. By its very nature, an FH product hops across the entire band. It will therefore spend time encountering interference from our product and causing interference to our product. There is no way to control where an FH unit will hop. Blocking out the portion of the spectrum that the equipment uses would be a possible solution, but in the United States the FCC does not permit FH devices to limit their hop--they must hop across the whole band.
Q. My WLAN system is seeing interference from a cordless phone. What can I do?
A. Most cordless phones are FH devices, with the potential problems inherent to such products. See the answer above for more information.
If the phone is a DS device and lands on exactly the same channel being used by the Cisco Aironet equipment, and if the phone is close to the equipment and you are using both simultaneously, then you will have problems. Try any or all of the following suggestions:
Change the location of the Access Point and/or the base of the cordless phone.
Switch to channel 1 on the Access Point. If that doesn't work, try channel 11.
Use a remote antenna on the client card if it is a PCI- or ISA-based card and you have that option.
Operate the phone with the antenna lowered, if that is an option.
If all else fails, use a 900-MHz phone instead of a 2.4-GHz phone.
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WebTrends offers software like this. We outsource a lot of our web stuff and one of our providers runs WebTrends and our people who like looking at pretty pictures really seem to like it. I have never installed or configured their software so I can't speak for ease of use, but the end user reports are easy to navigate. IIRC you can download a demo from their site and play with it. They do seem to have a demo report you can look at and see if this meets your needs.
I poked around microsoft's site and found this kb article about building server appliances, which may or may not meet your needs. I did notice that the hardware requirements for w2k pro, w2k server, w2k advanced server, xp, and xp pro all listed VGA display adapters as a requirement. I *think* that you may be able to get win2k datacenter servers without VGA boards, but those boxes are all designed around the vendors hardware so it would probably be pretty easy for them to drop VGA support if they didn't want it. I did think it was funny that Microsoft Services for Unix was a requirement for installing their Server Appliance Kit. I kind of expected them to use CIFS instead of NFS for some reason..... :)
If I were you I'd just throw some cheap VGA board in there and not plug a monitor in. That way you can remote admin it with VNC or Terminal Services or pc anywhere(ugh!) or whatever, but if you run into "big trouble" you can always plug in a monitor/keyboard/mouse. Win2k is ROCK SOLID so I don't think you'll ever have problems with it
I haven't personally had any big problems with the PERC boards, although friends and co-workers always seem to have had bad experiences with them. I've had really good luck with IBM ServeRAID boards. We have quite a few of these in production boxes and haven't had any problems with them(the IBM hard drives on the other hand...plenty of failures there). If your RAID problems are big enough that you're willing to put up lots of $$$ to get rid of them you could look at buying a SAN or NAS. That way, in theory, you could have the vendor install and maintain the disk for you. Generally they seem to do an okay job. I must mention however, that I have seen a vendor make an oops and drop power to an array while trying to fix a power supply problem. That took some time to get back online because the CE out on site wasn't familiar with that product and ended up having to get a senior CE to drive out and fix it. All and all it seems like the big boys(IBM, EMC, Sun, STK, etc) are pretty good about keeping uptimes in the 99.99%+ range(i guess that's what you give them the big bucks for).
The most common way for netops to find wireless APs is to look at arp tables for MAC addresses that are in ranges that are known to be used by wireless APs. If your AP supports using a localy administered MAC address just change the MAC to something else that is not in a known wireless AP range.
As convenient as 802.11b is, I do understand why many organizations do have policies against them(or strict configuration requirements). It really sucks to have to explain to your CIO that some people in a van out on the street jumped onto your internal networks poked around. Although, in a university environment I don't see how some wireless APs make the network any less secure, I mean you usually just walk in a library or computer lab or a dorm room and hop onto their networks.
The Morpheous people always seem to say that they just took the core as a black box, skinned it and released it. I find it hard to believe that they were able to do this without at least one or two tech people taking a peek at how it works. There must be someone technical that knows the protocol and know the app who can shed some useful light on the situation.
A Citrix solution may be appropiate in your case. You do need to realize that the servers and server admin time are going to be expensive up front and you need to do some analysis to ensure that this will really save you money over time. I have seen people implement a Citrix solution only to find out 18 months later that 50% of their users need to run some app that requires a fat client, so they end up with half their users having uber powerful PCs. Even if you think that some of your users will end up with 'big' PCs anyhow Citrix systems can still save you money. If you have a large user base the ability to push changes to all your users enviroments easily can save you tons of money. I have seen environments where users have fat clients but still use Citrix for a core set of apps such as Office and an email client and the IT departments were claiming large cost savings becuase they were able to upgrade their entire user base to the latest version of office by only touch the few servers in their Citrix server farm. Although, if you're looking at these benifits only, keep in mind that if you have a good implementation of SMS or a similar product you can use that to effect large scale app changes also. The biggest factor that determines the success of a Citrix implemenation, IMHO, is the skill with which the servers are configured and maintained. I've seen what should have been easy systems crash and burn due to user complaints about constant downtime, and I've seen people try to run apps that I never thought would work in a Citrix environment work great because of the expertise of the admins and the careful planning and deployment of the infrastructure to support the servers.
I've worked with a few people who weren't willing to comment on current or former employees. I think that a lot of that has to do with working in the public sector though, people tend to be a little sue happy. One thing I have noticed is that people who are hesitant to comment seem much more likely to comment on people who didn't perform/they didn't get along with/etc, although the conversations usually went like this:
"What did you think of Joe?"
"I can't really talk about him"
"Well, you did supervise Joe for a few years didn't you?"
"Well yes, but I don't really think I should say anything about him"
"Was he a good employee?"
"All I'm going to say is that yes he worked here and yes he worked for me. Take that to mean what you will, but I can't really say more than that"
"Ooooh, so you had problems"
"Sorry, I can't really say more than that, please talk to our HR people if you want anything else regarding Joe"
I wish that hadn't used those damn external power bricks. It did make the unit smaller, but I kept on loosing the power supply. It wasn't the easiest thing in the world to find a suitable PS for that box. I think that most of the downtime on the netwinder I had was due to lost power supplies.
Yes, the msfc2 is the L3 component. I was talking about a superviser 2 with a multilayer switch feature card and policy feature card. mmmm....yum yum.
I would recommend getting a cisco catalyst 6513 switch with the following configuration:
1 cat 6513 w/redundant ps
2 supervisor2/msfc2 cards
2 switch fabric module-2 cards
4 16 port fabric enabled gig-e cards
1 network analysis module
1 ids blade
3 48 port 10/100 power over ethernet enabled blades
if you can get two ports to the campus backbone i'd recommend using both of the ports and getting the campus IT folks to provision them off of separate switches and configure hsrp for you, then you could get another 6513 configured similarly to the one above and have a good sense of redundancy. One 6513 configured as the one above is should run you >$100k. If this doesn't fall in the 'cheap' catagory you could look at getting a cisco 3550-12T switch. this guy has 12 10/100/1000 ports and comes with basic ip routing functionality. its only $10k or so i think. If that is still too expensive you could look at something like a 2621 router, which has 2 100mbps ports. With the 2621 or the 6513 solution you could also add voice modules. You could have your local teleco provision a few PRIs to your dorm and become the campus CLEC or something. If you teamed up with other students at other colleges you could put voice gateways at a bunch of colleges and use the fat pipes between them to do toll bypass and give students across the world cheap long distance. If you went with the 6500 you'd also have a permanent space heater in your dorm. If you need an even cheaper solution i'd recommend using a linux box or something of that nature, not only will it be a fun learning experience, but it will be dirt cheap. oh, and i'll give you a cookie if you try to order the 6513 with WS-X6369-THC(that's the integrated bong option....ooh...you'll want the WS-X6569-THC, that's the fabric enabled bong option).
Depending on your backup and recovery needs you may want to look at using a SAN or NAS that has the ability to do snapshots or point in time copies of your data. All you'd need to do then is pause or stop your db engine, snap the filesystem and restart the db engine. This one approch you can take to expand your backup window. This can also let you take advantage of resources that may not be available during your normal backup window. For example, we have a storage tek tape silo that is heavily used at night by our legacy systems for various production jobs. That same silo is idle much of the day time hours. We have a NAS that supports snapshotting(a netapp filer) so we can pause our db engine at 2AM, snaphot the filesystem, and restart the db engine. Then the next day, when we have lots of available time on the silo we can dump it to tape. This also gives us quick restore capability, if we need it. For example, if the DBA makes a boo-boo and needs to restore the db they can stop the db engine, rollback to the snapshot from 2AM and restart the db engine. This takes very little time compared to doing a restore from tape. But, don't just snapshot the data because if the building burns down you'd be SOL. If you really need quick restore times and tape is still too slow you can look at replicated db's or replicated file systems. If you give your friendly local network appliance, veritas, IBM, sun, hp, compaq, EMC, or auspex sales person a call they would probably be more than happy to talk with you about various products that support some form of snapshotting, rollback, replication, clustering, etc. You may also be able to cut down the amount of data that you need to backup nightly. A lot of times in large databases there is tons of static data, for example if you have a a large GIS database with lots of satellite imagery you may find that you only need to backup the imagery quarterly or yearly instead of nightly.
IBM Netstations should be able to do X, ICA, and perhaps RDP(I haven't used one in a year or so, but I'd imagine that they'd have RDP supporty by now). At one point we had about 50% of our office running on these. Over time our users' needs have changed so we've migrated away from these, but some of the other departments in my organization have a decent install base of IBM Netstations. The only gripe we had about them when we used them was the video output quality was less than great. This has probably been fixed by now though. Another option, that I have zero experiance with, might be Sun's SunRay or whatever there thin client is called. I think you can get an ICA client for it(though I have my doubts about being able to find an RDP client) and it does support X. The SunRay may have a fan also, which violates the no moving parts idea. IIRC a lot of the 'Windows' thin clients(Wyse Winterms, etc) have a fan, so you may be stuck with fans anyhow. One thing I have noticed about thin clients(and cheap 'PCs' like the Compaq iPac) is that even though they may have no, or very few, moving parts that the failure rates are still about the same as a full PC. They always seem to have cheap power supplies that give out, especially if you have crappy power at your location). You didn't mention the size of this rollout, but if it is a large one you should take a good look at the management options for the clients you buy. Some have great centralized manament options and some have none. This can make a big difference when you find you need to upgrade firmware or change the configs on a bazillion clients. Good luck with your rollout!
I'm suprised to see the AC-130 in the Top Searches related to the war on terrorism. Its not the most common aircraft and it seems like many people haven't heard of them. It kinda suprised me that they haven't been using any A-10s in the war. I guess that range to target would have cut down a bit on their loiter time since we didn't exactly have any close airfields. Hrmmm...maybe they could make an AC-130 with a GAU-8/A Avenger cannon...heheheh...what impractical fun that could be! :)
There are pros and cons of both FH and DS spread spectrum. The general gist of it is that FH is cheaper and slower vs DS which is faster, more expensive, and sucks more juice. A quick Google search returns some interesting pieces on the advantages/disantvantages of DS and FH spread spectrum including this article on wireless-nets.com.
----
Q. Would another vendor's frequency hopping (FH) equipment sitting next to our direct sequence (DS) equipment have any negative effect?
A. Yes. By its very nature, an FH product hops across the entire band. It will therefore spend time encountering interference from our product and causing interference to our product. There is no way to control where an FH unit will hop. Blocking out the portion of the spectrum that the equipment uses would be a possible solution, but in the United States the FCC does not permit FH devices to limit their hop--they must hop across the whole band.
Q. My WLAN system is seeing interference from a cordless phone. What can I do?
A. Most cordless phones are FH devices, with the potential problems inherent to such products. See the answer above for more information.
If the phone is a DS device and lands on exactly the same channel being used by the Cisco Aironet equipment, and if the phone is close to the equipment and you are using both simultaneously, then you will have problems. Try any or all of the following suggestions:
Change the location of the Access Point and/or the base of the cordless phone.
Switch to channel 1 on the Access Point. If that doesn't work, try channel 11.
Use a remote antenna on the client card if it is a PCI- or ISA-based card and you have that option.
Operate the phone with the antenna lowered, if that is an option.
If all else fails, use a 900-MHz phone instead of a 2.4-GHz phone.
----
If you'd like to read the whole faq check it out at http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/102/wlan/radio-f