Honest CC4 Feedback?

[Quackers]

Got to see CC4 at a conference yesterday, i'm not an RM fan, but i have seen CC3, and CC4 looked like a big improvment, felt to me what CC3 should have been, the managment console looked so much better than the rubbish one in CC3 because it was an actual application, not a web based app.

[webman]

I see

 

I will admit I'm a little concerned over the 6hr build time - could you give us some more info please on what sort/spec of machines these are, the network infrastrucutre, how many machines you were building at once etc?

 

CC3 Build time on our latest computers is about 1.5hrs with usual software packages - Office, SIMS, ACTIVstudio etc.

 

Thanks

[Thesweeney]

The spec of the systems seemingly had no effect on the build time, took the same on brand new Sempron 2000+ with 1Gb ram as it did on the legacy systems (1.8G P4 256Mb ram/2.8G Celeron 192Mb ram).

 

Network is switched 100base, and we probably had only about 10 systems max building at any one time. From chatting with the RM tech that was down with us there, some other sites have been having the same timescales when building CC4 systems..

[russdev]

Well.. The migration to CC4 is done.. RM said 1 day start to finish, actually took the best part of 4!!! Must admit it does look nice and the new RMMC is better to use that the CC3 version.. Some of the points raised during the upgrade are below, hope these help those heading down the CC4 route, or make you think again!!

 

1. New RM supplied server hardware had chipset driver compatibility issues during server migration, causing re-imaging to fail. **Cost a good half day whilst RM tech was trying to rectify**

 

2. NIC driver rollback was required on the server to overcome failures on all client systems during build process. This failure is caused by the NIC driver on the server being ‘too recent’. **Cost 3-4 hours of build/re-build time whilst trying to figure this one out**

 

3. Workstation builds can only be done by bootable CD, but has just been released by RM on their support site, of the ability to make a bootable USB pen drive for systems that have no optical drive.

 

4. Legacy systems with low amounts of RAM (256Mb and under) require a ‘low-RAM’ boot CD, which seemingly needs to be left in for practically the entire build process.

 

5. NIC drivers need to be added to the boot images prior to burning, they do not come already in the image. **Not initially known by RM tech, cost 2 hours build time and several CD-R’s**

 

6. Boot CDs are site specific, so if you have multiple sites all going CC4 then you can’t use the one ‘master’ disc for all sites.

 

7. Workstation builds taking in excess of 6-7 hours from start to finish, due in part to the number of packages that were needing to be installed (in this case IRO 120, including hotfixes etc.).

 

8. Build was hanging for approx 2 hours+ on the systems attempt to install DigitalBlue movie software, which, it was later found out, is not compatible with CC4 in its current build configuration. **Again not known by RM tech until had spoken with other techs doing same upgrades at other sites.**

 

9. Workstations are re-booting themselves when a user logs back on after locking the system. RM is aware of this and working on a fix.

 

All in all, it probably is not all that bad, but as I said it took 2 of us the best part of 4 days to upgrade a site of 1 server and 55 workstations!! I really would not like to go through this on a large site..

 

Stay safe

The Sweeney

 

1) Well that is why you are a field trial site to pick issues like that up.

2) NIC drivers issues see those on non rm networks as well..

3) Been well documented that cc4 build disks would not use floppys.

4) Arr you not got all drivers installed yet package due to be rolled out soon that adds all drivers to your server (like a final release will have) should of been mentioned in the pre field trial emails well was said to me.

5) some good logical reasons behind one is that as it helps remove need for hardware packs.

6) I would guess this will be fixed in final release..

7) Doesn't take as long as that well not for us..

8) Well digiblue works on no computer rm or not

9) Yes known issue

 

Took use two days two servers....

 

As said in previous post lot of what your engineer did will be made part of automatic package but in field trials they keep separate till near end so they can pick up issues and solve them easier.

 

Russell

[Thesweeney]

@ russdev:

 

All noted, but there has never been any mention of the site being used for/as a field trial. As far as myself, the head and in house ICT co-ord were aware it was a live roll out, been all the way through the documentation/e-mail and everything.

 

Have they not been doing these field trials for a couple of months now?? Surely the RM tech would have been aware, or at least made aware, before coming onsite to do this upgrade of the issues that appear to happen cross-site.. My point being that we probably wasted a good day and a half on trying to resolve what should have been known issues to him..

 

Your point 8 - Yes I know.. Has anyone ever managed to get it to work properly;)

 

Point 9 - OK so it is a known issue. How long have they known about it? With you knowing would indicate that RM have known for a while, and given that they are rolling this out in a live teaching environment where it has the ability to seriously disrupt the learning experience for the little people, surely they should be working on a resolution on the hurry up..

 

Sorry if it is sounding like I am having a bit of a rant here....

 

Deep breath...and relax...

[russdev]

arr sorry you are controlled roll out site sorry thought were field trial site ok my mistake.

 

Can see your point on engineer (internal communication is something I nag rm about a lot...)

 

As for number 9 me knowing about no that wouldn't indicate they known about it for long time.

 

Russ

 

@ russdev:

 

All noted, but there has never been any mention of the site being used for/as a field trial. As far as myself, the head and in house ICT co-ord were aware it was a live roll out, been all the way through the documentation/e-mail and everything.

 

Have they not been doing these field trials for a couple of months now?? Surely the RM tech would have been aware, or at least made aware, before coming onsite to do this upgrade of the issues that appear to happen cross-site.. My point being that we probably wasted a good day and a half on trying to resolve what should have been known issues to him..

 

Your point 8 - Yes I know.. Has anyone ever managed to get it to work properly;)

 

Point 9 - OK so it is a known issue. How long have they known about it? With you knowing would indicate that RM have known for a while, and given that they are rolling this out in a live teaching environment where it has the ability to seriously disrupt the learning experience for the little people, surely they should be working on a resolution on the hurry up..

 

Sorry if it is sounding like I am having a bit of a rant here....

 

Deep breath...and relax...

[PiqueABoo]

just been released by RM on their support site, of the ability to make a bootable USB pen drive

 

Cannot compute.. cannout compute.. ::head explodes::

 

This aspect is regular Microsoft WAIK technology. To make a USB that boots a PE image you need to add a Vista boot sector to the USB and then throw a standard set of folders and file on it, including the WinPE2 *.wim file. You can do the boot sector part on Vista, If on XP/2K3 you can use the MS tool Bootsect.exe. All of this just works.

 

The difference for CC4 is that they provide a custom version of a PE *.wim file (that you may have added drivers to) and an XML file with some parameters for the RM build app that runs as soon as PE has loaded. You can copy those with Explorer. In short you don't/didn't need RM to build CC4 boxes via USB. Not sure why they wrote their own utils, but perhaps they're more friendly.

 

That XML file is why you can't take build CDs to other sites. It would have been nice if the build app got that from the network (chose one from a list). Apart from saving making CDs, it would also mean that PXE builds, yet more regular Microsoft WAIK technology, would work.

Edited June 16, 2008 by PiqueABoo

[Butuz]

The spec of the systems seemingly had no effect on the build time, took the same on brand new Sempron 2000+ with 1Gb ram as it did on the legacy systems (1.8G P4 256Mb ram/2.8G Celeron 192Mb ram).

 

Network is switched 100base, and we probably had only about 10 systems max building at any one time. From chatting with the RM tech that was down with us there, some other sites have been having the same timescales when building CC4 systems..

 

The fact that slow workstations take the same time to build as new workstations would indicate to me that there is either a Network bottleneck - or a Server bottleneck. When you say "switched 100mbit" do you mean this is the workstation speed or the server speed (or both?)

 

Andrew

[Thesweeney]

@ Butuz: Everything is 100BaseTX...

[Butuz]

I would suggest then that the bottleneck could be because your server is connected at 100 TX. I would reccomend you try upgrading the switch to 1000TX so that you can run the server 10x faster than it is currently.

 

That may help. I don't have CC4 so I can not test!

 

Also, out of interest - what is the specification of your CC4 server?

 

Andrew

[budgester]

The one thing that really bugs me with building clients is why can't they get it to build using PXE ?

 

I've used unattened.sourceforge.net to build machines with a boot usb/floopy/cd, so it's not difficult.

[Thesweeney]

Server is brand new...

 

Twin Xeon 1.60GHZ

2Gb DDR2

Twin 500Gb SATA HDD

Integrated Intel Dual-Channel Gb Ethernet

Plus the other usual stuff...

 

So yeah, it could well be down to the infrastructure.. But it is a small primary (no more than about 80 pupils), and consequently has a limited budget...

[PiqueABoo]

I don't have CC4 so I can not test!

 

Oh you don't need to.. lots of 100Mbps workstations simultaneously grabbing lots of big files from one 100Mbps server is going to be slow with or without CC4. They needed a better switch when they first got CC3 back whenever.

 

it is a small primary (no more than about 80 pupils), and consequently has a limited budget

 

Uhh? They had a CC3 system and chose to spend £££s on a CC4 upgrade which won't make much difference to the user's desktop experience, as opposed to getting a £2-300 switch that would immediately improve network performance? Or was this a recent CC3 installed as a stop-gap until CC4 was ready?

[Thesweeney]

Uhh? They had a CC3 system and chose to spend £££s on a CC4 upgrade which won't make much difference to the user's desktop experience, as opposed to getting a £2-300 switch that would immediately improve network performance? Or was this a recent CC3 installed as a stop-gap until CC4 was ready?

 

"ours is not to reason why...." To be honest I have not got a clue how all this came about. We have only been providing support for this particular school for the last 5 months or so.. From reading between the lines of what the head down there has been saying they have had a string of very poor support and advice from both the LEA and the secondary school local to them that used to provide the support.

 

The wheels were already in motion for the CC4 upgrade by the time we took over, plus the teachers there seemed happy with CC3 even though they themselves have said it's carp...

[Theblacksheep]

Had a few plays now on build 27 (when is a final release candidate scheduled?), i understand they have patches available for build 28.

 

1) Update feature not implemented, don't know date for implementation.

2) CC3 package for CC4 network nowhere to be seen.

3) Drivers could not be added to the boot disk for initial boot (so it couldn't find the network drivers for a dell laptop). I can think of a work around for this.

4) Exchange mail integration package?

5) DVD builds?

6) CC4 MMC network programme in taskman freezing a few times.

7) Impressive and powerfull management console.

8) 1-2 HR client build times.

9) package import, distribution and installation smooth.

 

Not as confident, but have a few months before our install.

Edited June 27, 2008 by Theblacksheep

[webman]

This is exactly why we are setting up CC4 as an essentially new network parallel to our current one, configuring and testing, and only migrating user data and applications once we are happy it's working.

 

To us, the single upgrade step of Windows 2000 CC3 to CC4+SAN+300 workstations on a 6-year-old network during the summer holidays is asking for trouble.

[Theblacksheep]

Anyone got ay updates on CC4....

 

I've had a play with CC3 package importing, not many of our packages seem to be working. The big 'office' ones are ok, but dreamweaver mx etc crash.

 

Custom PE drivers can now be inserted, but the network car driver insertion doesnt have as much info as the normal drivers section, so you cant accuratly identift drivers easy. No OS listed for PE drivers, so adding a vista driver (which you cant tell if you've got a large pool of drivers) crashes an XP build disk creator.

 

No exchange integration till late in the year.

 

Buggy task management, i've had loads of tasks sitting waiting to be done, with no force through buttons...

[t4ll1f3r]

Day 1

4 Hour installation script runs on the server (server supplied by RM)

2 Hour upgrade script runs on the server, it seems the first script just gives you the pre-release version of CC4. The second script makes it work.

 

Day 2

Before proceeding the engineer need to check in with RM House as there had been quite a few errors during the instalation and he wasn't happy about continuing until they were resolved or explained.

Two hours later RM House says go ahead they are OK????

What appears to be a very long document of installation instructions need to be hand entered by the engineer.

First WS build attempted Dell. Boot disk created installation proceeds until XP kicks n then fails.

Having failed we moved onto the new RMOnes, this should be easy. After an hour of trying we discover that the RMOne is not compatible with CC4, new drivers at the end of the week. The engineer has to leave as he has another job to go to tomorrow.

 

Day 3

No engineer, RM promise one for the end of the week.

I realize that the default boot disk has enough of an idea about the NIC to boot and start the installation once Windows XP starts up you also need the correct driver in the Database.

P.S. fi there s a folder called drivers on my driver CD why can't I just point the Database Import routine at it and get all the drivers installed in one go, and if I am installing the first one for XP surely I should be able to tick a box to say they are all going to be for XP tis time. Any way I have to keep selecting inf files and telling the box its for XP for all my drivers.

Loaded all Del drivers into the database. RM seems to need four dotted notation on the version numbers as well so need to add a few ".0".

The build worked, 2 hours with no other apps installed.

 

Day 4

On the fourth day I rested!

 

Day 5

A new engineer arrived.

I pointed him at all the errors in the Application Event log on the server and left him to it

Most errors gone or explained.

Now for the RMOne, it appears that all that was needed was renaming the NIC driver in the database. RMOne working.

Screen saver locks, unlock it and it reboots, The engineer hadn't seen this before. Tried the same thing on the Dell with the same effect. hone call to RM house and there is a patch / package that appears to solve the problem.

I load the drivers for the Dell Latitude into the database and the build seems to work fine.

Job signed off, training on Monday

I'll be back!

Edited July 13, 2008 by t4ll1f3r

[Tallwood_6]

Great we go CC4 in a week, RM have sheduled 2 days to upgrade 3 dcs an exchange box and and a damm if they cock it up i think that will be the final straw for RM at our site, they made a hash up with our Forest Root migration last year and as it stands at the moment i think i would rather have the vanilla LEA solution.

[t4ll1f3r]

The installation progresses.

 

Post sales techie spent a day with us and resolved some of the issues.

 

Have now built several different models of workstation and a laptop.

 

Got the boot working off a usb stick for the machines without CD drives. Some of the older machines don't seem to know how to boot of the usb stick though. More work to be done there tomorrow.

 

Package builds loom on the horizon.

 

Another training session on Tuesday next week.

 

Users imported from a csv but you can't import the passwords however these can be done with a net user command in a batch file.

 

Users divided into folders by year of entry, originally put them in folders denoting their year group but decided this would be impractical so year of entry seemed better.

 

I'l be back

Edited July 16, 2008 by t4ll1f3r

[Theblacksheep]

We've now canceled the CC4 'upgrade'...

 

RMs Vista looks like it needs another year of development before its a fully integrated school platform. Too many important features in the unproven 'todo' list.

[maniac]

Got the boot working off a usb stick for the machines without CD drives. Some of the older machines don't seem to know how to boot of the usb stick though. More work to be done there tomorrow.

 

Sometimes on older machines it picks up USB memory sticks as hard drives, so if you look at your boot device order, you might find the memory stick listed as a hard drive. (Obviously turn the machine on with the memory stick inserted first) Simply place this ahead of your main HDD in the boot order, and it should boot from it fine. I have a lot of very old HP TC1100 tablets that I boot from USB like this.

 

Mike.

Edited July 17, 2008 by maniac

[t4ll1f3r]

Sometimes on older machines it picks up USB memory sticks as hard drives, so if you look at your boot device order, you might find the memory stick listed as a hard drive. (Obviously turn the machine on with the memory stick inserted first) Simply place this ahead of your main HDD in the boot order, and it should boot from it fine. I have a lot of very old HP TC1100 tablets that I boot from USB like this.

 

Mike.

Thanks Mike

 

I'll take a look on Monday.

 

Having played with it a bit more now I think it is going to make my life easier over the summer.

 

We are merging two schools together, 700 PC's 200 Laptops. 5 RM servers.

 

Having got the machine build sorted on the majority of the machines we just have to do some work on the packages now.

 

Edited July 27, 2008 by t4ll1f3r

[t4ll1f3r]

The USB sticks don't seem to want to boot on the older machines. Under any circumstances.

 

They are being detected but fail when they try to boot.

 

They are working fine on the newer PC's.

 

3 Days traing started to day. Training being done by a Veteran RM guy who has been though all lines of support so knows his stuff. Which is good as a lot of things that should be working aren't.

 

The Management Console is very slow, techies are working on the new release to speed things up ~Dec 08

 

Package building tomorrow!

 

I'll be back

[russdev]

Yes RMMC in cc4 has had its issues latest version i have seems to be lot better than it was.

 

As for usb build keys did they work on cc3?? as I know some older machines bios can be awkward about usb keys so not such much a cc4 issue but bios issue.

 

Russ