MWR

Thanks Fazza - just had such a senile moment (it was working earlier this afternoon and that shell crashed and I when I resumed, I restarted std powershell rather than the customised environment ...oops - bafflement terminated by Dr. Google). Back to this impoverished DPM environment that necessitates using PShell and then modifying the ForceFree.ps1 script template which is NOT marking Unknown/Un-labelled tapes 'Free'... p.s. After finding no debugging messages (I enhanced the provided script), I changed Write-Verbose to Write-Host but later found out why: "The Write-Verbose cmdlet writes text to the verbose message stream in Windows PowerShell. Typically, the verbose message stream is used to deliver information about command processing that is used for debugging a command. By default, the verbose message stream is not displayed, but you can display it by changing the value of the $VerbosePreference variable or using the Verbose common parameter in any command." Also, the required syntax is "Slot-n" rather than "Slot n" as the DPM console so kindly presents it :-( (yes that is in the -? help) p.p.s. How sneaky ! "$TapeLocationList -contains $media.Location" so the input list did not have to be parsed into a list. No way do I want to keep typing Slot-n, ...I guess I'd better split the input list :-)

Thanks for that posting Steve. To clarify: No, I'm not confusing ASDAN with the local non-ASDAN installation for Alan tests that we are using - which is working well. I apologise if my wording resulted in any forum readers thinking that ASDAN offered a product that avoids mid-exam internet connectivity issues by working offline.

The school I am at uses the local installation. This means that the internet connection is only used for registering exam requests and (later) uploading the exam sessions/results. During the examination, the only connectivity to be maintained with a guaranteed performance is to the local server. If a client PC crashes, we can start another PC and continue from he last point reached in the exam by the student. I too have heard of ASDAN users experiencing "failure" at the end of an exam session which requires the whole test to be set up and run again. This has a considerable impact on re-scheduling the exams and invigilators not to mention the disheartening impact on the students. Has anyone else experienced this or is it an issue that ASDAN have addressed already ? Thankyou for any further feedback