MailBag Friday (#40) – Thin Client Technology

Every Friday, we dedicate this space to sharing solutions for some of the most frequently asked questions posed to our ThinManager Technical Support team. This weekly feature will help educate ThinManager Platform users and provide them with answers to questions they may have about licenses, installation, integration, deployment, upgrades, maintenance, and daily operation. Great technical support is an essential part of the ThinManager Platform, and we are constantly striving to make your environment as productive and efficient as possible.

We are planning system upgrades at one of our facilities and are currently running ThinManager 3.1 with two ThinServers. To reduce the amount of work to be done when we take the facility offline, we want to upgrade ThinManager to the current version (6.3) while we are still in production. Are there any tech notes or “best practices” documents available for doing this?

Yes, you can take the servers off line one at a time and the terminals will continue to run if failover and redundancy are configured properly. Please note the following:

1) You need to use Server 2003 R2 SP2 or later for the ThinManager Servers. We use .net framework 4.0 with ThinManager 4.0 and later and the .net framework doesn’t install on Server 2000.

2) You need to break the auto-synchronization before the upgrade. If you don’t, the mis-matched ThinManagers will interfere and cause database errors.

We have a knowledge base article at http://www.thinmanager.com/kb/index.php/Upgrade_Procedure:_Mirrored/Redundant_Systems.

-TM

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I had a question regarding ThinManager compatibility. The Compatibility Matrix on your website says that Windows 2008R2 is supported as a ThinServer with the current version of ThinManager 6.0. Are there any known issues using a Synced Redundant Pair of ThinServers in which one Server is the 2003R2 SP2 32bit, and the other is a 2008R2 64 bit machine?

You shouldn’t run into any issues synching between different operating systems. Keep in mind that a path that might be valid on the 64 bit machine might not be valid on the 32 bit machine. 64 bit machines have a Program Files (x86) directory where 32 bit applications get stashed as opposed to a 32 bit operating system where there is just the traditional Program Files directory.

-TM

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I am looking for a hardware recommendation. I need a fairly rugged ThinManager compatible thin client. However it needs to have one HDMI or DVI and one VGA connection on it. Do you have any recommendations?

The Contec BX955D:

You would have to get a DVI-I to DVI+VGA Splitter (sold separately) but this client would work with Packages 5 & 6.

We would also recommend you check our Hardware Partner page to view a list of all available ACP compatible clients.

-TM

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We are replacing some old hardware and wanted to know if the Arista 7824 thin client is compatible with ThinManager 3.1?

Yes. It will work with ThinManager 3.1 SP2.

-TM

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Tom Jordan