[sims] Solus 3.8 Released

[zag]

Seems to have been released in the last few days and has some welcome improvements:

 

- The updates of the SOLUS3 downloads can be automatically or manually extracted so that sites who want to manage their own SIMS deployments can do so.

 

- Any open instances of SIMS or FMS running on a workstation will now be closed when an upgrade is performed by SOLUS3. This will enable the upgrade to complete successfully.

 

The Agent Notifier has been enhanced to

- Display SIMS software application versions on that machine

- Enable manual redeployment of an update

- Enable a re-install of a SIMS or FMS application.

 

- Support for SQL2014

 

- If you are running SOLUS 3.8 (or later) and the SIMS 2014 Autumn Release (or later), and you attempt to run SIMS or FMS and the version of the client does not match that of the corresponding database, SOLUS identifies this and offers the you the option of carrying out the upgrade now or at a later date

 

Just installing it now so will report back how I get on.

[zag]

Hurray finally we can see the client versions easily using the agent!

 

Edited November 18, 2014 by zag

[Griff]

any improvement in speed etc? mine is so slow since they upgraded the whole gui :\

[Atomic_Zombie]

It looks like a great update. Question: Do the Agents update when they next check in / come online? or do they only get updated when it is deployed?

[zag]

any improvement in speed etc? mine is so slow since they upgraded the whole gui :\

 

The GUI is still painfully slow. Its probably the slowest piece of software I have ever used!

 

It looks like a great update. Question: Do the Agents update when they next check in / come online? or do they only get updated when it is deployed?

 

I cant really tell yet. It was successful for 99 of our clients. Will keep an eye on it. I would think it should update when they come online as the agent is already present on most machines.

[PhilNeal]

Is SOLUS3 slowness a general problem? It has never looked slow when I've seen it demo'd.

[winng]

Navigating between screens on Solus 3 is painfully slow...... it's slower with 3.7.

[dastrix]

I guess I'm lucky that mine didn't update

[Atomic_Zombie]

Our SOLUS 3.7 is generally ok, taking ~2 seconds to switch tabs. Running on SQL 2012 express.

[zag]

Is SOLUS3 slowness a general problem? It has never looked slow when I've seen it demo'd.

 

Yep seems to happen on all the installs i've seen.

 

I get about a 2 seconds delay when clicking "Agents" for the first time.

 

Another 2 second delay when clicking targets ect.

 

Another 3 second delay when clicking Upgrades >> Update Library

 

When you see the demo its probably been open for a while.

[Meldrew]

Does anyone know what the 'Server instance name patch for SOLUS3.8' is all about that appears to have been released at the same time?

 

Meldrew

[zag]

Does anyone know what the 'Server instance name patch for SOLUS3.8' is all about that appears to have been released at the same time?

 

Meldrew

 

No idea but its installed automatically when you deploy the main upgrade

[Ecclesbury]

RE SOLUS GUI speed, the biggest issue I have is when re-deploying an update if I want to 'check all' or 'un-check all' clients it takes forever (rough guess about 10 seconds.)

 

Anyone else have this? Is this something to do with our environment or a SOLUS issue?

[Meldrew]

No idea but its installed automatically when you deploy the main upgrade

 

Many thanks - hadn't noticed that.

[Griff]

Anyone else have this? Is this something to do with our environment or a SOLUS issue?

 

What is your environment? ours is on a VM we are using Xencenter, SIMS server is running Server 2008 R2 Standard 64bit

[synaesthesia]

Not bad, getting better; still has a daftly confusing double-tab setup, and it still can't handle stations being renamed (For instance ,right now I'm looking at a machine that used to be called BURSAR02, it's now just BURSAR and solus3 doesn't like that fact. It responds to everything in SOLUS as Bursar02.

[zag]

Yeh the rename thing is so annoying.

 

I had about 10 clients where the agent simply didn't work anymore because we have renamed them.

[IT_Man_Dan]

I'm currently trying to update to 3.8 from 3.6.94 which Capita said was ok to do on phone but it appears to currently be rolling back all the 3.7 agents after supposedly succeeding It's failed the Solus 3 DB update.

 

Looks like I'll have a fun day..

[Griff]

Just some feedback on the slowness issue I asked at a SIMS Update Seminar thing yesterday and they had no direct answer for it but I would say about 6 other schools have also noticed the slowness issue and this is on various different setups. We were reminded about the whole SQL upgrade to 2012 or 2014 this has to be before the summer release, they also talked about what looked like a full version of SIMS via an App on your phone which they are working on, was just a brief comment didn't actually get to see it. My last point the seminar was good but there were no cookies or biscuits of any type real let down

[minimoo]

I'm currently trying to update to 3.8 from 3.6.94 which Capita said was ok to do on phone but it appears to currently be rolling back all the 3.7 agents after supposedly succeeding It's failed the Solus 3 DB update.

 

Looks like I'll have a fun day..

 

Do you have NT Authority\System as a SQL SA out of interest?

[minimoo]

Is SOLUS3 slowness a general problem? It has never looked slow when I've seen it demo'd.

 

The 1-2 second delay clicking on buttons is mildly annoying, however, I find it's the amount of troubleshooting/baby-sitting it requires (when compared to other things e.g. windows updates / sophos deployments etc). As an example, we deployed solus 3.7 on 27/6/2014, and currently have 10 agents that are still running the 3.6.94 release of solus - in some cases, are on the latest sims, but old solus. We've spent the last month gradually trying to locate PC's around site that haven't applied windows updates or solus updates and fixing.

 

Both solus/windows updates etc can get into a state where they don't update due to corruption, power cut at wrong time etc, but it's definitely more time consuming dealing with solus compared to some of the other deployment solutions out there. Although equally, credit where it's due - solus has been getting better at each iteration - and some of the stuck old agents are due to old issues that have already been fixed so won't happen again in the future.

 

However, IMO at least, capita made a bad design decision with their choice of TCP port. Until we changed the port that Solus used two years ago, we used to get random failures due to capita using a port in the middle of the range Microsoft state windows uses for outgoing connections (The default dynamic port range for TCP/IP has changed in Windows Vista and in Windows Server 2008). @PhilNeal: I'm somewhat surprised Capita didn't change the solus port to something outside this range 2 years ago, and request an assignment @ IANA — Application for Port Number or Service Name. As well as microsoft, that form lists "User port numbers range between 1024 and 49151." as the user-assignable port range for TCP... Any idea why the default port currently used was picked?

 

 

Paul

Edited November 27, 2014 by minimoo

[zag]

Yep we always have around 15% of all agents fail to upgrade themselves or Sims on each update.

 

Its far worse than Solus 2 unfortunately.

 

EDIT: hopefully the new retry feature from the client will help that

Edited November 27, 2014 by zag

[matt40k]

However, IMO at least, capita made a bad design decision with their choice of TCP port. Until we changed the port that Solus used two years ago, we used to get random failures due to capita using a port in the middle of the range Microsoft state windows uses for outgoing connections (The default dynamic port range for TCP/IP has changed in Windows Vista and in Windows Server 2008). @PhilNeal: I'm somewhat surprised Capita didn't change the solus port to something outside this range 2 years ago, and request an assignment @ IANA — Application for Port Number or Service Name. As well as microsoft, that form lists "User port numbers range between 1024 and 49151." as the user-assignable port range for TCP... Any idea why the default port currently used was picked?

 

Sorry, I don't understand Paul. It'll be cool if they did register for a port with IANA, but generally you wouldn't get one as it'll only be LAN traffic so they'll tell you to use the user-assignable port range, ie 49152-65535 which is a free-for-all. I guess they picked it as it was in the middle of the range and hopefully free.

[minimoo]

Matt,

 

I know when we first moved to solus 3 - we hit issues early on with solus service(s) not starting due to windows using the same port - fix for that at the time with capita support was to change the port below 49151 (to avoid colliding with windows). This has worked fine up until 3.8.53 where we hit the problem that the MSI installer hasn't been updated to customise the new configuration entry for the local 'check for updates' button (easily worked-around by a custom powershell script).

 

However, in terms of your question - if I look at RFC6335 which covers the port number /service name procedures - the following text seems to state that applications "MUST NOT" use a static port within the dynamic range:

 

" Ports in the Dynamic Ports range (49152-65535) have been

specifically set aside for local and dynamic use and cannot be

assigned through IANA. Application software may simply use any

dynamic port that is available on the local host, without any sort

of assignment. On the other hand, application software MUST NOT

assume that a specific port number in the Dynamic Ports range will

always be available for communication at all times, and a port

number in that range hence MUST NOT be used as a service

identifier."

[matt40k]

On the other hand, application software MUST NOT assume that a specific port number in the Dynamic Ports range will always be available for communication at all times, and a port number in that range hence MUST NOT be used as a service identifier."

 

Thus why you can change it Sorry, I know what your getting at.