Cleaning out the Wisdom agent completely

Here’s a bit of info which may come in handy for those of you who spend a lot of time cloning machines and contemplating using Wisdom to manage the clones. As you may know, there are 3 methods in RES Wisdom for identifying the agent:

1. Using the WUID option
2. The MAC address of the first NIC and
3. 3) a combo of the computername and domain name.

In an environment where cloning is performed, using option 1 is not recommended as it may lead you to agents disapearing from the Wisdom console. This is due to the fact that the WUID is written into the HKLM portion of the registry, hence it will be part of the image. This is why we usually recommend either using MAC address or domain+computername as the Agent identification method here

When you uninstall the Wisdom Agent, it’s a quite clean operation. However the WUID value will remain on the target machine when you uninstall it. Although this is per design, it may have some unforseen consequences if you are in the middle of building your clone template. Hence it would be nice to know what to clean out in order to forget the Wisdom agent has ever touched a machine.

The registry keys you are looking for are:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\RES\Wisdom\Preferences\WUID
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WUID\Default

If you need to clean out the Wisdom agent completely, make sure you delete both the WUID keys.

Configure global PowerFuse settings via registry

Here’s an interesting item which was shared a while back. This is a policy template for controlling the global settings of RES PowerFuse. It is believed to have been created by Sander over at the RES Inside blog. This template adresses an important need, since several options in the management console are still only globally configurable through the console GUI and may not apply to all users.

Using this policy template, it’s not the intention for you to start managing PowerFuse through AD. While possible it would be crossing the bridge for water, as PowerFuse in it self is perfectly capable of applying the user-specific parts of any policy template file. So, what we’re dealing with here is a way for PowerFuse to configure itself, using registry settings, while remaining inside the RES console. Sounds iffy? Don’t worry, it’s not – just do the following:

• Download the .ADM file from the link below
• Dump it somewhere  you can browse to it with a PowerFuse console
• Go to the configuration management | powerlaunch | user registry node
• Click the Add Policy button at the bottom
• Hit the Add button in the new dialog to browse for the .ADM file. It will now be uploaded to the PowerFuse SQL database, so you needn’t worry about distributing it anymore.
• Add some descriptive text in the name and description fields. You’ll thank yourself for this some months later down the road.
• Set to whom this applies on the Access Control tab.
• Start clicking away in the policy template, enabeling the desired settings.

There is a nice description of the entire thing in this PDF: 

Download the ADM file here (rightclick, save as): 

Important note: The PowerFuse policy template available above does not include the latest registy settings in the PowerFuse update pack 8.0.4.5.  Also, there may be some additional registry settings in this article about the PowerFuse registry, which are not included at the moment. If someone would be kind enough to update the policy template and share it with RESguru, we’ll post it.

PowerFuse 2008 SR4 update 8.0.4.5

Yesterday,  RES Software released an update of the Service Release 4 for PowerFuse 2008. It is now version 8.0.4.5. This update contains many important fixes. At the bottom of this posting, there is a link to download the releasenotes. There are also several cool enhancements to this update. These are mainly some interesting registry keys which you can use to tweak PowerFuse with. Here is an overview of these new settings, quoting from the releasenotes:

Configure cache timer interval. It is now possible to configure the cache timer interval. This interval determines how often the cache checks for changes in the database or for new transactions. The default for this interval is 5 seconds. This interval can be changed by setting the following registry key:

Key   : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareRESPowerFuse

Value : CacheTimerInterval (REG_SZ)

Data  : A value between 5 and 60 (seconds)

Warning: Changing the default of 5 seconds should only be done in special cases, such as a heavy load on the database server. 

Disable screensaver when RES PowerFuse Workspace Extender is active: When a RES PowerFuse session is started from a workstation with the RES PowerFuse Workspace Extender or the RES Subscriber Agent, the RES PowerFuse session will enable a Screensaver by default. It is now possible to change this behavior, by setting the following registry string value in either HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or HKEY_CURRENT_USER

Key   : SOFTWARERESPowerFuse

Value : NoAgentScreensaver (REG_SZ)

Data  : Yes

Force LogOff of disconnected sessions after timeout: It is now possible to force a logoff of disconnected sessions after a specified timeout expires. This can be enabled by setting the following registry keys in either HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or HKEY_CURRENT_USER

Key   : SoftwareRESPowerFuse

Value : ForceLogoffEnabled (REG_SZ)

  Data  : Yes or No (to enable/disable the mechanism)

Value : ForceLogoffTimeout or ForceLogoffTimeoutOnDisconnect (REG_SZ)

  Data: value in minutes

Value : ForceLogoffOnDisconnect

  Data  : Yes or No

If you are already using the ForceLogoffOnIdle mechanism, the timeout in ForceLogoffTimeout can be used to use the same timeout for both mechanisms, or you can use a different timeout to disconnect by setting a value in ForceLogoffTimeoutOnDisconnect.

Silent refresh of RES PowerFuse sessions: A silent refresh of RES PowerFuse will not show a splash screen during a refresh of the Workspace Manager, which in some cases is less intrusive for the user. A silent refresh will only be used when the refresh is a result of a display change, a USB device change or a reconnect of a disconnected session. “Silent refresh” can be enabled by setting the following registry key in either HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or HKEY_CURRENT_USER:

Key   : SOFTWARERESPowerFuse

Value : SilentRefresh (REG_SZ)

Data  : Yes or No 

The release notes for the 8.0.4.5 update can be downloaded here: