Cache This! (Technote)

Here’s a solution to an annoying little problem which has been bugging more  than a few people out there recently. This was originally posted in the Guru’s Forum but it seemed to make sense to make an article out of it. Here’s the skinny: You’ve just installed PowerFuse 2008 for the first time and everything seems hunky-dory in the console. Then you try to log into a session as a user and get this little number (click it to enlarge):

Click here to read the full article.

Integrating InstallFree with PowerFuse

Here’s something really useful. Sylvester de Koster over at CDG,  did some crunch time together with the nice folks over at RES to find a way to integrate PowerFuse with InstallFree, which is an application virtualzation technology vendor. Until now it’s been somewhat difficult to get stuff to run inside the virtual bubble of this platform. Together these  awesome guys managed to figure out how to integrate Installfree’s Full Bridge with PowerFuse! What follows is the no-frills how-to.  Later we will perhaps make a nice article with screenshots and everything. For now her is just  the raw info – Just as you like it! :)

Click here to read the full article

SR1 Wisdom update

Okay, this is some old updates which have been sitting in the queue for a while without getting published. Nevertheless, there’s some good info in here on how to upgrade Wisdom.

March 27th, RES Software released an update package for RES Wisdom. The Service Release 1 package for Wisdom 2009 is available for download from the RES Portal. The update can be downloaded here (this requires you to have a valid SA logon).  So, what’s new in this update you might ask? There’s a good deal of fixes:

Have a look here for more info:  

If you havent’ tried upgrading Wisdom before, don’t worry. It’s piece of cake (really, it is! :) Essentially, you fire up your console and point to the update package, which is automagically uploaded and distributed thereafter. All the agents, dispatchers and consoles will upgrade themselves without you having to do anything.

1) You download the .WUP file (Yes, WUP is short for Wisdom Update Pack :). Start your Wisdom console and go to Infrastructure | Datastore | Setup | Components.

2) Here you use the button, and it’s pretty much a next, next finish job from there.

The mere thought of having a production system upgrade itself on a massive parallel scale,  may scare the  living daylights out of you. If it does, it just proves you’re still sane! :) Seriously, Wisdom is one of the most stabile platforms out there and it handles itself very safe and sanitary. One of the very little known facts of the product is that you can actually downgrade to an earlier update package version. So, if something isn’t working right, it’s possible to do a rollback. The version range where this is possible has yet to be determined, but we will ammend this post as soon as this has been clarified.

Happy upgrading

/TRG

Secret Tools of the Common Crow…

This posting was really supposed to have be called Secret tools of the RES Engineer, but then all of a sudden, an old Gary Larson cartoon came to mind, and ruined everything… Damn you Mr. Larson!! ;-)

Okay… so maybe a spatula isn’t gonna make the 10 o’clock news, but perhaps some other tools which are little known, which are really nice to know about would peak your interest. There is just one catch to this. You’ll have to ask around for the utilities in this article as they were really only written for internal use, but several customers and integrators got copies of them. Please do NOT contact RES Support for these tools.

Nevertheless, you ought to know about them as they can help you speed up a troubleshooting session by having the information available. Perhaps RES will make these things downloadable in the future. If this happens, stick around, RESguru will let you know.

Click here to read the article.

How to make a grAvatar

First of all, what’s a grAvatar, and why the heck would I want one, you might ask. Second, if I decide to agree with that, how do I get one? And what does this have to do with RESguru in the first place? All valid questions, which is we will have a look at here.

An Avatar in general is just a way of enhancing your appearance if you comment on blogs, such as this swell one. Out of the box, WordPress (on which RESguru.com is built) will automagically generate an auto-avatar (the icon which is next to your screen name) The auto-avatar, as seeen on the right, is calculated from your screen name, hence it will be unique to you, but you’d proably prefer something else to look at.

The idea with a grAvatar (Globally Recognized Avatar), is to create an Avatar which will work across many blogs where you might decide to leave your comments. So in short, it’s just a little global eye candy, which will spiff up your postings here. That’s all.

To get one, all you have to do is to sign up for free at www.gravatar.com All you have to do is to use the same email address which you supplied to RESguru.com when registering. Chose some snazzy logo and you’re done. In a mater of minutes, your newly created grAvatar will be visible next to your postings when you create one. Note, this is not applicaple to the Guru Forum, as it’s a seperate webapp.

Preconfigured voluntary settings in a mandatory profile

This little blurb was inspired by an email to a partner, explaning the differences between PoweFuse’s PowerLaunch and the UserPreferences. This lead to an example on how you can combine these two parts of PowerFuse. The goal is to be able to provide the user with preconfigured, voluntary settings – in a mandatory profile environment. Let’s take a real-world example on this:

We have some users which share a mandatory profile, where the default webpage for IE has been set to about:blank or something else long ago. This setting coded into the .man profile and we don’t want to bother hacking into it since our goal would be to have it changed dynamically, according to group membership.

For example: We want to have users in group1 initially having www.batman.com as their homepage and group2 should have www.superman.com as their homepage. To make the entire thing a bit more interesting, we want to provide the user with the option to change their homepage to something else if they prefer to do so.

To summarize we are talking about creating a dynamic, group assigned voulentary user registry setting on top of a mandatory profile. Sounds iffy? Not at all. This example is easy to follow, but you can of course just download the PowerFuse buildingblock at the end of the article. The registry key we use for this example is HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftInternet ExplorerMainStart Page (REG_SZ)

1. If you haven’t already done so, create a PowerFuse application for Internet Explorer (other browsers can be used, but you’ll have to figure out the registrysettings then for yourself)
2. Edit the IE app and go to the Configuration | PowerLaunch tab, click Add.
3. Create a powerlaunch user registry setting for the IE startup page www.batman.com. using the HKCU registry path above. Make sure to mark the reghack with the Run-Once checkmark.
4. Go to the Access Control tab of the reghack, assign it to group1.
5. Export the newly created reghack to a temporary file. This done in the “Registry|Export registry file…” menu inside the PowerFuse registry buffer editor. We are going to use this export one steap further ahead.
6. Save the reghack and return to the PowerLaunch tab of the application
7. Repeat step 2 above, then go to the Registry|Import registry file… and pull the temporary regfile in again (it can safely be deleted after this btw).  In the new reghack, change the startup page to www.superman.com and assign this one to group2. Notice that the name and any comments you added before was preserved in the regfile. Once you’ve configured the reghacks for both groups it should look like this:
8. Let’s setup the User Preferences. Go to Properties|User Preferences, while still editing the app. Here we can specify one or more seperate items which should be saved before the logoff destroys the mandatory profle. Using the Add button, you can choose to add:
   1. A single registry value (like we are using here)
   2. A registry key (containing multiple values)
   3. A registry tree (a branch containing multiple registry keys)
   4. A single file in the profile (such as normal.dot for office)
   5. A folder in the profile (such as cookies or favorites)
9. Fashion the user preference so it looks something like this (remember, you can download the buildingblock below if you want to make sure you build it right). Click on the image to zoom.

When the app has been saved and the user sessions refreshed, PowerFuse will write the correct IE startup page to the registry uppon first time user launch of IE. During the session, the user may perhaps change the homepage of IE to something completely different. Regardless of this, User Preferences will capture the current value of the IE startpage key at logoff and save it, just before the mandatory profile is tossed into Mount Doom. To try all this out for yourself, download the BuildingBlock:

Rightclick and save-target-as here:

Reducing the size of the PowerFuse database

A brand new article has been posted to the Technote Library. This time we’re diving into the PowerTrace tables. Being new to PowerFuse, some will be inclined to switch on everything, including PowerTrace turned to the Maxx, resulting in a potentially very unwanted huge heap of logdata and perhaps even a slow performing DBMS too.

This article explains how to both cure that situation if things have gone megabad, but also how to prevent it from happening in the future. 

Click here to read the full article.

Working with the RES PowerFuse Security models

A new technote has been added to the Technote library. This one is a hands-on how to work with the RES Security models. There has been a bit of confusion how these work. For example, what is the difference between authorizing an application on global level, versus on the individual application. This article will also help you get a grip on what you need to do in order to go from test into production with PowerFuse. Finally we discuss what is needed to do on an ongoing basis to handle change management (new apps) in the PowerFuse environment, once the security is locked down.

Go read the article here

One application in Powerfuse using App-V on Workstation/Server

So you’re running RES Powerfuse, Microsoft App-V, Windows XP/Vista and Windows TerminalServer? Instead of having to install in the same directory on the desktop- and the server version of App-V, you can do an environment variable, which can handle the install path difference. What will I gain from this, you might ask? Well, You’ll only need to maintain one application, instead of two (or more)

This is how this can be done. Download the document here:

Laptops and offline homedirectories

A busy week, yet somehow another technote has been completed. This one describes how to PowerFuse to easily configure a homedrive to be mapped on a laptop both when it’s online and offline. Also there is an example on how you can use a component in PowerFuse to actually synchronize the data.

This new technote can be found in the newly TechNote Library here: http://resguru.com/technote-library/ (which is an effort on the authors behalf to keep a sense of structure to this blog. A permanent link has been placed on the right.