ChrisA's questions

Setting up a new server; the motherboard is a Supermicro X10SRW-F.

It has two SATA controllers, one with 6 ports, one with 4.

The one with 6 ports already has a DVD drive connected to it.

I'm about to use 4 x 512GB SSD drives in a RAID 10 array, and I have a choice of which controller to attach the drives to. The BIOS options look identical.

The server came prebuilt, with all the SATA cables connected to the back of the drive caddies; they're all tied up with cable ties and I don't want to get into rerouting them. Therefore the choice of which drives to attach to which controller is simply a choice of which bays to plug them into.

If I attach them to the 6-port controller, the one that already has the DVD drive attached, it happens to give me a logical SATA0 - SATA3 in left to right order, which will minimise the risk of pulling out the wrong drive accidentally later on.

Is there a downside to this? I seem to remember from the distant past that a CD drive on the same IDE cable as a HDD was a Bad Idea - surely there's no such limitation now with SATA?

All 10 SATA ports are SATA3.

According to the manual, the 6 port controller is supported by the Intel PCH chip. The 4 port one is supported by the Intel SCU chip. I don't really understand the significance of this difference.

My Windows Server 2008 R2 should be almost idle, yet it's taking about 12-15% CPU almost all the time. The busy process is an instance of svchost.exe

Using SvcHost Process Analyser, I've established that the services running in this process are as shown:

However, I don't know which is (or are) contributing to the CPU usage.

How do I get more detail?

I'm currently tearing my hair out over an inability to connect to a Hyper-V VM on a Windows 2008 R2 Server.

One of the straws I'm considering clutching at is a complete removal of the Hyper-V role, and then adding it back in again.

Is there anything I should consider before trying that? I don't have physical access to the box, so I'm somewhat nervous of doing anything that could mess up the host OS.

I've been setting up a Windows Server 2008 R2 locally - all went well, and I added the Hyper-V role. Then I created a new VM using the Hyper-V Manager, and added a dynamic VHD.

I could start the VM and connect to it, within Hyper-V Manager. I did not, at that point, install an OS on it.

Up to that point, the host computer had been running on my local network. Then, it was shipped to a colocation company, and now has a new IP address.

It has an IPSEC policy assigned, that allows IP traffic from my local IP address, so I can remote into it via RDP, and my userid, which is in the Administrators group for the host server.

However, I can no longer connect to the VM within Hyper-V Manager. I can see that it's running from the thumbnail, but connecting to it seems to time out.

Would appreciate any suggestions. I've tried deleting and recreating the VM, but the result is the same.

Edit:

In case I wasn't clear:

• There is no OS on the VM
• I could connect to the VM from the Hyper-V manager before the host machine was shipped to the colo, now I can't

(Yet) another edit!

This is what my IPSEC filter looks like now:

But I still can't connect.

Final edit:

It doesn't let you create a rule where the source and destination IPs are the same, but reasoning that any traffic from 'My IP address' must be Ok, I added the following rule, and it seems to do the trick:

Still not really sure why the more complicated one isn't allowing the local traffic, but I seem to be Ok now. My thanks for the suggestions.

We're a very small company, about to install a new server at a colocation company. The plan is to install the OS, SQL, and IIS, test it, then courier it to the hosting company. It will then presumably appear online, ready for further set up. We plan to manage it over RDP.

Last time we went through this process, we were using Server 2003, and the IPSEC admin was something of a grind.

Is it any different with Server 2008? Is there a quick way of restricting all access except that originating from a couple of IP addresses?

Would appreciate any pointers, or a good idiot's guide to securing Server 2008 for non-experts.

I have users in a group on one server, and I'd like them all to have access to a particular database on a SQL Server on another server.

Neither server is in a domain, and I'm not using AD.

Is it possible?

We have a Windows Client/(SQL-)Server application which is normally installed at the customer's premises.

We now need to provide a hosted solution, and browser-based isn't feasible in the short term.

We're considering hosting the database ourselves, and also hosting the client in a VM. We can set all this up easily enough, so we need to:

• ensure that the customer can connect easily, and also
• ensure that we suitably restrict access to the VM (and its host, of course)

We already access the host and guest machines across the internet via RDS, but we restrict access to it to only our own internal, very small, set of static IPs, and of course theres the 2 (or 3?)-user limit on RDS connections to a remote server.

So I'd greatly appreciate ideas on how to manage:

• the security
• the multi-user aspect.

We're hoping to be able to do this initially without a large investment in virtualisation infrastructure - it would be one customer only to start with, with perhaps two remote users.

Thanks!