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Show version # in Unattended list (or indicator of needed update)
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promptcare
#1 Posted : Tuesday, January 17, 2012 4:53:37 AM
Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 9/15/2011
Posts: 78
Location: ON, Canada
As we add new Unattended to our lists, it's inevitable that some may not need a session for some period of time and their installed version will drift farther and farther back. It would be beneficial to know which clients need upgrades, especially now that we can push an upgrade on to the client's machine.
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bigdessert
#2 Posted : Tuesday, January 17, 2012 5:17:23 AM
Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 9/14/2010
Posts: 458
Location: Minnesota
I agree 100% with this. There should be some where in the web panel that shows the version of the guest client.
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Jake Morgan
#3 Posted : Tuesday, January 17, 2012 12:56:30 PM
Rank: Administration
Joined: 4/9/2010
Posts: 860
I agree
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Jeff Bishop
#4 Posted : Thursday, January 19, 2012 12:40:30 PM
Rank: Administration
Joined: 4/14/2010
Posts: 140
Location: Raleigh, NC
This does sound like a reasonable and useful request, I will make sure its listed in our ticketing system today. The way we manage this currently is by appending the software revision to the end of the unattended name so that we can see what revision is installed at a glance. But if you have hundreds of unattended sessions something you could filter on or query would be useful. Thanks for the suggestion.
ScreenConnect Team
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bigdessert
#5 Posted : Thursday, January 19, 2012 2:41:34 PM
Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 9/14/2010
Posts: 458
Location: Minnesota
Jeff Bishop wrote:
This does sound like a reasonable and useful request, I will make sure its listed in our ticketing system today. The way we manage this currently is by appending the software revision to the end of the unattended name so that we can see what revision is installed at a glance. But if you have hundreds of unattended sessions something you could filter on or query would be useful. Thanks for the suggestion.


Could you explain this more? I am curious how you are accomplishing this currently.
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Jake Morgan
#6 Posted : Thursday, January 19, 2012 3:02:52 PM
Rank: Administration
Joined: 4/9/2010
Posts: 860
I select all of our sessions, do a reinstall and name them:

Code:
%COMPUTERNAME% 2232


Obviously this doesn't work as well when all of your unattendeds have different names. We could maybe start defining some environment variables ourselves for you to use for SC version.
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bigdessert
#7 Posted : Thursday, January 19, 2012 3:05:12 PM
Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 9/14/2010
Posts: 458
Location: Minnesota
Jake Morgan wrote:

Obviously this doesn't work as well when all of your unattendeds have different names. We could maybe start defining some environment variables ourselves for you to use for SC version.



Now this sounds like a great solution. All of our unattended systems are statically named. So it would be nice to label Computer1-%SCVersionNumber% for instance!

Then whenever an upgrade is done that session variable gets updated automagically!
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promptcare
#8 Posted : Monday, January 23, 2012 2:46:36 AM
Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 9/15/2011
Posts: 78
Location: ON, Canada
Is there a variable to support that? For that matter, are there any other variables supported other than ComputerName and UserName?
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bigdessert
#9 Posted : Monday, January 23, 2012 3:36:17 AM
Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 9/14/2010
Posts: 458
Location: Minnesota
promptcare wrote:
Is there a variable to support that? For that matter, are there any other variables supported other than ComputerName and UserName?


There is not one presently. Jake was thinking about creating one. Only problem with environmental variable is it is windows only. Would be nice if the software just sent info to the relay service about it's version info. Then the web service could pick it out of the relay stream.

To access windows current environment variables:

For XP:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310519

For Windows 7:
http://www.itechtalk.com/thread3595.html
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John S
#10 Posted : Monday, January 23, 2012 2:15:52 PM
Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 5/6/2011
Posts: 48
Location: Essex UK
In addition to showing the version number, a green/amber/red icon could be shown next to each unattended client to indicate whether the client version matches the server, minor version is different or major version is different.
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Jeff Bishop
#11 Posted : Thursday, January 26, 2012 2:00:20 PM
Rank: Administration
Joined: 4/14/2010
Posts: 140
Location: Raleigh, NC
I'm a big fan of quick & easy visual indicators in the UI that are helpful, these sound very helpful. I will get them submitted and we can figure it out from there. Also I wanted to mention that, and I am doing this with a note that I'm not a Mac expert, I believe Macs can support environmental variables they are just not as easily accessed/modified/prevalent as they are in Windows. Our KB article talks a bit about this but as noted I'm not an expert in this arena or most arenas for that matter!

Unattended KB article: http://help.screenconnect.com/HOWTO-0007.ashx
ScreenConnect Team
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rboatright
#12 Posted : Friday, January 27, 2012 7:33:45 PM
Rank: Member
Joined: 10/17/2011
Posts: 11
Location: Topeka, KS
We need descriptive names....

also, how do you do that reinstall. Reinstall is grey'ed out on my system. :-)


Jake Morgan wrote:
I select all of our sessions, do a reinstall and name them:

Code:
%COMPUTERNAME% 2232


Obviously this doesn't work as well when all of your unattendeds have different names. We could maybe start defining some environment variables ourselves for you to use for SC version.
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bigdessert
#13 Posted : Friday, January 27, 2012 7:35:53 PM
Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 9/14/2010
Posts: 458
Location: Minnesota
Make sure you are at a 2.4 version. Then you need to make sure you gave your login user rights to reinstall and uninstall. This should cause the buttons to not be grey as you will now have rights to perform the actions.
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paulrick
#14 Posted : Thursday, March 01, 2012 3:37:56 PM
Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 3/9/2011
Posts: 39
Location: Lancaster, Pennsylvania
I wanted to "bump" this thread. I think adding the version number to the Unattended installs would be a massive help in troubleshooting issues with ScreenConnect. Also it would be great to see a list of installations that need to be brought up to date.
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Jake Morgan
#15 Posted : Thursday, March 01, 2012 4:28:39 PM
Rank: Administration
Joined: 4/9/2010
Posts: 860
The latest 2.4 releases have environment variables set for this ... But we're considering this method unsupported, as I think there could be a cleaner way to accomplish this rather than cramming everything into the tag, and in that case we may remove these. But we felt there was a need for them at least temporarily.

Code:
version:
2.3.2400.4443

format:
Major.Minor.Build.Revision

Major = 2 = SCVERMAJOR
Minor = 3 = SCVERMINOR
Build = 2400 = SCVERBUILD
Revision = 4443 = SCVERREVISION


We tag ours with: %COMPUTERNAME% - %SCVERBUILD%

People who only use stable releases could do something like: %COMPUTERNAME% - %SCVERMAJOR%.%SCVERMINOR%

These variables are scoped to the Elsinore.ScreenConnect.GuestClient process.
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bigdessert
#16 Posted : Thursday, March 01, 2012 4:45:43 PM
Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 9/14/2010
Posts: 458
Location: Minnesota
Jake Morgan wrote:
The latest 2.4 releases have environment variables set for this ... But we're considering this method unsupported, as I think there could be a cleaner way to accomplish this rather than cramming everything into the tag, and in that case we may remove these. But we felt there was a need for them at least temporarily.

Code:
version:
2.3.2400.4443

format:
Major.Minor.Build.Revision

Major = 2 = SCVERMAJOR
Minor = 3 = SCVERMINOR
Build = 2400 = SCVERBUILD
Revision = 4443 = SCVERREVISION


We tag ours with: %COMPUTERNAME% - %SCVERBUILD%

People who only use stable releases could do something like: %COMPUTERNAME% - %SCVERMAJOR%.%SCVERMINOR%

These variables are scoped to the Elsinore.ScreenConnect.GuestClient process.


Yes, there must be a way cleaner way to do this. possibly the client should transmit version to the relay server and then the web service could read it out of that. Maybe even have it written to the session log for record keeping.
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Jake Morgan
#17 Posted : Thursday, March 01, 2012 5:00:18 PM
Rank: Administration
Joined: 4/9/2010
Posts: 860
The version is actually the first thing that is transmitted as part of the handshake, so the Relay does know it, but our session log format isn't really super-extensible now. We have a "Data" field, but it's just a string, and I don't want to start cramming stuff in there either because it will get unwieldy, so the next step is likely to make the session data more flexible. There's some other really important data such as client type that we'll certainly want to knock out with this ... and while we're at it some basic machine specs would be useful for Relay to know (and therefor need a way to get into the session logs).

One of the things we've been spending (and sometimes feel like wasting) time on is some really aggressive compression for screen data. We do quite well already, but through some trickery we can get down to nearly half of the current bandwidth for true color lossless data. This takes gobs of CPU/Memory, mainly on the guest side, but if these are plentiful and bandwidth isn't, Relay can figure that out and negotiate with everyone to be a little more aggressive.
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ComputerHero
#18 Posted : Thursday, March 08, 2012 3:29:02 PM
Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 5/20/2011
Posts: 34
Location: Calgary, Canada
Jake Morgan wrote:

One of the things we've been spending (and sometimes feel like wasting) time on is some really aggressive compression for screen data. We do quite well already, but through some trickery we can get down to nearly half of the current bandwidth for true color lossless data. This takes gobs of CPU/Memory, mainly on the guest side, but if these are plentiful and bandwidth isn't, Relay can figure that out and negotiate with everyone to be a little more aggressive.


Along this line, most of my client sites have more bandwidth than processing power, especially if I'm dealing with new sites. On some machines SC eats up all available resources when connected as it is. As such I'd prefer if the low bandwidth/high resource setting was optional.
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ComputerHero
#19 Posted : Thursday, March 08, 2012 3:31:56 PM
Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 5/20/2011
Posts: 34
Location: Calgary, Canada
Wouldn't it just make more sense for SC to automatically push an update when the client is out of sync with the installed version on the server? I can't think of any advantage to wanting to manually wanting to do upgrades, not that it's a huge hassle. To me, I'm happier when software takes care of itself, maybe auto-upgrades can be turned on only for stable versions.
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cobash
#20 Posted : Thursday, March 08, 2012 5:08:43 PM
Rank: Member
Joined: 12/10/2011
Posts: 19
I personally wouldn't want it to do updates. When you support terminal servers the last thing you want to do is to start installing programs/updates when you have 50+ people logged in. Not to mention if there is something wrong with an update and it does happen to not work or break something I wouldn't want to have to fix it on 100+ computers. But that is just me.
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teksigns
#21 Posted : Friday, March 09, 2012 12:00:26 AM
Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 6/20/2011
Posts: 112
Location: NC
cobash wrote:
I personally wouldn't want it to do updates. When you support terminal servers the last thing you want to do is to start installing programs/updates when you have 50+ people logged in. Not to mention if there is something wrong with an update and it does happen to not work or break something I wouldn't want to have to fix it on 100+ computers. But that is just me.



I agree Cobash ...

Much better just to have a version number displayed and let the admin decide what to update and when .
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paulrick
#22 Posted : Tuesday, March 27, 2012 8:17:23 PM
Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 3/9/2011
Posts: 39
Location: Lancaster, Pennsylvania
I would love the idea of automatic updates. It would be great to turn that feature on or off via the Administration Panel in ScreenConnect.
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