safe way to kick people out of sims.net?

[The_Traveller]

I need to back up sims in the middle of the day, but we have people logged in. is there a way to either safely log people off, or see who is logged on. i know there is a way to see who is logged on, but i dont know how.

[marco84]

On the sims server > Right click My computer > Manage > shared folders > sessions

This will give you a list of people who have open session on the sims server. you can also kick them out from there by right clicking on the user and clicking end session however this may be a problem if a user is making some changes in sims.

[WithoutMotive]

We have a staff meeting every morning and I tend to tell the staff what I intend to do then. Then, I send a "net send" an hour before, 30 minutes before, 15 minutes before and just before telling them to save what they're doing and log off SIMS.

If they come complaining that SIMS went off half way through them doing something, they can't say I didn't tell them.

[kmount]

Not technically relevant but why would you back it up during the day?

[Geoff]

Prior to an upgrade I'd imagine.

[Jamman960]

You don't need to get people out of sims for a backup via system manager, its probably best to pick a quiet time to perform the backup though.

[kmount]

Ah, we shedule all of our upgrades before school so that a back up can be reliably taken.

 

I read the OP as an 'ongoing' arrangement so wondered whether there was some rationale behind it which we could build on.

 

I think as Jamman said you can use System Manager to take an online back up plus when Solus does its bit it runs a back up first anyway which should be enough I'd have thought if you did your nightly back up the night before you run the risk of losing a couple of hours work should 2 back ups fail.

[lahori10]

We usually face this problem when Sims.net need to be upgraded. The upgrade windows list the files that will be upgraded and also shows the list of people who are still logged on to the system. Had to go to them one by one to ask them to come out of the system.

 

In the last upgrade that was done recently I logged on to the server using Logmein over the weekend and did the upgrade remotely. And to my surprise it went extremely well.

[EduTech]

We have an automated back up run every evening when we aint there.. but we perform all the back-ups when everyone has near enough gone home so say about 5ish. dont have any problems that way and we dont mind staying a little late one day a month to perform an update

 

* i say we its normally me *

 

But i would say why dont you just set it to automatically back up on an evening or first thing in a morning before everyone comes in.

 

James.

[FN-GM]

We normally stop the database (kicks everyone out) then rename the connect.ini file (ensures nobody can get back in) then start the database

[EduTech]

We normally stop the database (kicks everyone out) then rename the connect.ini file (ensures nobody can get back in) then start the database

 

I dont go to that extent, but suppose it works

[Edu-IT]

There is never a right time to upgrade Sims. If it breaks in the evening then you run the risk of staff complaining the following day, rightly so, because it should work. Same applies if you do the upgrades in the morning.

 

Does anybody look forward to upgrading Sims?

[EduTech]

I always wait for the upgrade to wait and then login to sims on the server and then on a random staff machine. if that works theres normally nothing major wrong.

 

I dont really look forward to updating sims.. but its not something i hate doing.. lol.

 

James.

[FN-GM]

Hate sims updates. We normally do ours in the holidays. We pretty lucky the people who support us are in our schools grounds so response to problems is usually rapid, in the office within minutes.

[Edu-IT]

Hate sims updates. We normally do ours in the holidays. We pretty lucky the people who support us are in our schools grounds so response to problems is usually rapid, in the office within minutes.

That's not so bad then.

[SeanVin]

On the sims server > Right click My computer > Manage > shared folders > sessions

This will give you a list of people who have open session on the sims server. you can also kick them out from there by right clicking on the user and clicking end session however this may be a problem if a user is making some changes in sims.

 

In the list you can see if the users have read or write access, if they only have read it is safe to kick them off. (The majority of our staff only have read access anyway.)

[Jamman960]

I usually do the sims upgrades on the first day of any holiday and generally stay 1 update behind... we hadn't any problems until I had to do one last monday(last week of term) ready for a visit from capita on thursday... we ended up unable to run/design reports until capita sorted out a patch for us yesterday morning :/ talk about worst possible timing.

[The_Traveller]

The powers that be decided to do the new timetable the other day, but were worried they might make a mess of it so wanted a backup of the mornings work on the timetable before finishing it off. We usually only stop sims for backup at night, or just after everyone has left.

[rob_f]

I thought timetables were part of Nova-T6? Which, if it is as it was 4 months ago, isn't part of the SQL database until you "commit" it. In which case a file-level backup of the timetable workstation and the fileserver would suffice.

 

That is, of course, unless you are committing it to SQL.