[sims] Spring Update grrrrr

[featured_spectre]

Spring update 2011 has corrupted all of our installs of SIMS (excluding on the server) and I am not impressed with how they handled it on the phone.

 

I phoned up 3 different people, and I got the same response

 

"This update has been known to corrupt installations and the only fix is you have to go round to each machine and reinstall Sims"...Do they think I have all the time in the world?

 

Absolutely shocking!!!

[glennda]

I've had this on only one machine though!

 

I feel your pain!

[featured_spectre]

The reaction is what got me annoyed!

[zag]

Yeh I've had this on a few machines in the last few days. I thought it was just the machine.

 

I just get a Sims application fault when trying to load it.

[TechMonkey]

Ohhh I'm glad you posted this. We assumed it was something hinky with our system. Had about 15+ die so no Monday morning registers and the whole of the day spent going around, disrupting lessons so I could fix it all for PM registration.

 

That is a shocking response as well. & I'm sure that will all change once Solus3 is up and running. Ohh wait, no I mean the whole site will need to manually reinstalled.

 

Where do we invoice for our time wasted?

 

EDIT: Ohh & for information remotely deleting SIMSLoad.ini & letting the user reopen SIMS does not work, it needs an admin logged in to reinstall now. Great change.

Edited April 28, 2011 by TechMonkey

[Jaymate]

Hi,

 

Not sure if it helps in anyway but in the past we have had a few fail and found that simply copying the C:\Program Files\SIMS\SIMS .net folder from an upgraded working PC to a broken PC does the trick.

 

Funnily enough not had any failed with this update so far! (makes a change)

 

J

[PhilNeal]

Nephilim it would be helpful to know the case number as giving out this news has to be handled sensitively; we'd also like to understand why you've had a total failure. It is the right advice - if an upgrade fails with SOLUS 2 the fastest way to get going again is to do a workstation visit.

 

We did an early adopters roll out as usual without any reported issues and we do not have a large list of cases so I do not understand why anyone told you that "this upgrade is known ..."

[TechMonkey]

Just so you know Phil, ours would run through the upgrade and then Pulsar would not be able to run. In the Event Viewer was a .Net 2 generic error. I spent a good day and a half trying to troubleshoot and fix .Net on my station, where I found this first, before randomly trying to reinstall SIMS to find the solution. It wasn't on every machine and on some machines it was found to work if another user logged on and ran the upgrade. In the extreme cases it needed an Admin to log on and start the upgrade, something we have never needed to do before.

 

I don't normally mind having to reinstall SIMS as usually all that is needed is to delete the SIMSLoad.ini & let a user open SIMS again. This time though that would not work and HAD to have an admin do it.

[laserblazer]

I'm not sure if it's related but I've just received an email from our LEA support to say that the Spring upgrade knackers Nova-T6 and there's a fix on Solus. We haven't had any problems to date and we don't use nova-t6.

[PhilNeal]

No that's not related.

[vikpaw]

Thankfully, during the break, the technicians went around to all the important PCs and upgraded with admin rights, so haven't had any occurence of this yet. I guess i'll find out tomorrow when the people at the outer reaches try to use SIMS for their reports ..

[NorthernSands]

Ours updated fine. We did a server migration at the same time so the only problems we had were the machines that had hard coded Connect.ini and / or mapped drives. Having said that, we actually left the SIMS.ini pointing to the old server so the workstations updated from that, but the S: drive and Connect.ini referred to the new one (if they were pointing correctly). I'm thinking (hoping) we'll have SOLUS3 in place before we need to do another update, so we can use that to do the update (would that then update the SIMS.ini?).

[glennda]

Ours updated fine. We did a server migration at the same time so the only problems we had were the machines that had hard coded Connect.ini and / or mapped drives. Having said that, we actually left the SIMS.ini pointing to the old server so the workstations updated from that, but the S: drive and Connect.ini referred to the new one (if they were pointing correctly). I'm thinking (hoping) we'll have SOLUS3 in place before we need to do another update, so we can use that to do the update (would that then update the SIMS.ini?).

 

I just scripted to xcopy down a replace sims.ini file after we migrated server and i noticed it was still looking at the old server

 

something along the lines of

 

if exist C:\newsims.txt goto end

xcopy \\server\share\sims.ini C:\windows\sims.ini /the /relevant /switches

echo done

end

 

thats roughly what the script said!

[Cache]

I used the attached script to update our SIMS.ini when we migrated servers.

updateSIMSini.vbs

[NorthernSands]

@glennda and @Cache: Thanks for those scripts. I'll be working with the network manager to update the SIMS.ini. We'll have a look at these and see what we make of them!

[vikpaw]

I did as you @NorthernSands so had a new server and needed a new mapped drive as well as sims.ini (don't know why it's had the server name hardcoded!). This was the batch file i made that i got the technicians to go around and run in the holiday. I got the Network Manager to put the mappings parts into Logon script for staff.

 

Also i made the batch file available as a link on the intranet for those that had issues, mostly remote offices and computers that could not be accessed. The only slight issue was that the script needed to be 'run as adminstrator' in order for the files to copy to those locations. To make this easier for staff, i made a shortcut to the batch file. Then right click properties of the shortcut and advance properties has the option to 'run as administrator'. This then meant it could copy the files to those restricted windows 7 locations.

 

Now the new SIMS.ini refers to the S: drive, so shouldn't ever need changing again.

 

echo off
echo DELETING OLD S: DRIVE
net use s: /delete
echo MAPPING NEW S: DRIVE
net use s: [url="file://\\SIMSSERVER\SIMSDATA"]\\SIMSSERVER\SIMSDATA[/url]
echo COPYING SIMS.INI TO PC
xcopy "G:\vik\sims\sims.ini" c:\windows\ /f /h /r /y
echo .
echo COPYING CONNECT.INI TO PC
xcopy "G:\vik\sims\connect.ini" "c:\program files\sims\sims .net\" /f /h /r /y
echo .
echo IF THE DRIVE WAS MAPPED SUCCESSFULLY AND BOTH FILES COPIED ACROSS THEN YOU CAN RUN SIMS .NET
echo SIMS SHOULD UPGRADE ITSELF THEN YOU CAN LOGIN
pause