MailBag Friday (#41)

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.

 

What would be the maximum number of thin clients a pair of ThinManager servers can support?   Can you provide a number for how many simultaneous thin client bricks and sessions have been tested and confirmed by ACP?

Thin Client (hardware count) isn’t going to be your limiting factor, ThinManager can manage an unlimited amount of thin clients.  We have numerous customers who use hundreds of thin clients from one pair of servers.  Our internal testing has shown that once you have ~10,000 (sic) thin clients in ThinManager, ThinManager will become slow to load and exhibit less than desirable performance.  The scalability bottleneck is going to be on your application side, meaning the better question to ask your software provider is “What type of/how much hardware will I need given X amount of sessions”.

-TM

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I’m trying to start two hardware clients. Both are the same model but only one of them works well.  The other one freezes in the blue screen where shows downloading firmware.  I checked all hardware components and found only one difference, the network controller.  One is 0x10d3 and the other is 0x10EA.  Do you think this could be the cause for failing to start? Is there something we could do to fix this?

 

According to our compatibility list, 10d3 is a supported network adapter whereas 10EA is not. Update the unit’s BIOS to the latest available and make sure PXE boot is setup properly and you should be good to go.

-TM  

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We are using WinTMC 6.0 and we can’t to connect to ThinManager (6.0).  Currently set up on Server 2008 R2 using a machine with the 64 bit version of Windows 7.  Is this a known issue?

You need to install the latest version of WinTMC, 2.2.0.3.  It can be found at downloads.thinmanager.com. This is the version that shipped with ThinManager 6.0 with Service Pack 3.

-TM

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I’m trying to run sound files through my thin client and I do not have a sound card in any of my servers, so I am using the sound device available in our Advantech UNO-2173 thin clients. When I add the generic sound driver we get a tada wav file sound, but then the client will not play any additional sound bites.  The I get the following windows message:

Windows media player cannot play the file because there is a problem with your sound device. There might not be a sound device installed on your computer, it might be in use by another program, or it might not be functioning properly

Any ideas how to correct this?

It sounds when you rebooted the thin client, the existing RDP connection remained intact. You will need to reset the session and sound should work correctly.

Start > Run > tsadmin.msc > Server Name > Sessions Tab > Right click on the RDP session and go to ‘Reset’

-TM  

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Tom Jordan

Marketing Lead for ThinManager - A Rockwell Automation Technology