FROM THE IGLOO

Well, we have updated Faronics Core 3.2 to address the update issue that some of our customers where seeing. The new build is up on our site and should be avaliable for download  in the appropriate places.

If during the update you still have some issues please contact the support team at 800-943-6422 x 1 and we can assist further.

Well it looks like the folks at Intel are looking into getting systems to be a bit more energy friendly. The Register has a article here that details some steps that they are looking at that could have a fairly good impact on the power consumption of today’s computers.

I know for a fact that I probably push my work machine more than most people do, but even I don’t need a quad core machine for checking email (not that i’m complaining about having one mind you).

For those of you who have not heard we have a new release of Core Console available and have finally updated all the associated products to work properly in this new Core Console. WINSelect was the last holdout and was officially signed off on last Friday by our QA teams and should now be available for download from the usual locations.

Core Console 3 represents a fairly large under the hood change in the Core Console product line, and I would honestly recommend it as a upgrade for pretty much all of our customers. The product page for the new version of Faronics Core can be found here. With this build we address a number of customer suggestions and comments about the Core Console that we have gathered over the past year or so.

We have separated the Console UI and the Core Server as two separate components. This change, while it seems small has a number of benefits for the end users:

• Multiple consoles talking to a single Core Server so that more than one person can be managing workstations through the same Core Server
• You can now install the Console UI on a different machine than the one running the Core Server, so you no longer have to remote desktop into the computer running Core Console to manage workstations.
• You can control multiple Core Servers from a single Core Console.
• Faronics Core no longer needs to be running interactively for a scheduled event to be run. This allows administrators to schedule events and then log off the server completely and still have the events fire properly.

That last point is probably one of the most requested features for Core Console by far.

The other big change that we have done is that we have moved away from using WMI / DCOM as our communications protocol between clients and the Core Server. We have opted to move towards our own protocol based on SOAP for a number of reasons.

First off it gives us more control over what we are doing and allows us to better support environments with mixed operating systems. The second thing that is does is gives us finer control over how we use the network. With WMI/DCOM we had to accept a rather large port range as needing to be open for optimal results (port 135 and anything above 1024), with our new protocol we only require that three ports be addressed (one on the client, two on the server). And finally it frees us up from needing to rely on Windows Authentication as much as we have been, making the software more consistent in Workgroups or situations where a full AD implementation is not in place.

As stated earlier, if you are running an older version of a Core Console managed product I would suggest grabbing the latest versions and giving Faronics Core another poke. And to answer the inevitable question, yes Deep Freeze will wind up in Core Console,  but I don’t have a specific timeframe as for exactly when it will occur.

I originally posted this on my personal blog, but it’s a interesting note so I figured what harm is a little cross posting.

Had a small problem today.

I do a lot of photography and back in 2004 I finally put down the cash for a DSLR and proceeded to shoot whacks of photos. And up until last year everything was good. Then I hit 10,000 photos and the counter on the camera rolled over back to 0001. I didn’t think much of it at the time but the end result was that I started getting duplicate files in the directories that I import my photos into, so there where two files called DSC_0001.NEF on my hard disk.

No problem I figured, I segment the photos into folders based on the year that I shot them so as long as I make sure not to something silly with the photos I should be fine. Now skip ahead a year or so and now I’m seriously considering a copy of Lightroom for managing my photos as it does some really neat stuff with post processing the photos and should really cut down the time I’m spending working on getting photos processed the way that I want.

So, to test I load up a test system with Windows 7, toss in the updates and my applications and then upload a copy of my digital negatives onto the test machine and leave Lightroom to import the entire six years worth of photos. After several hours of grinding away at it I find that there’s a large number of errors during the import – namely that a whole bunch of files are duplicates and already exist in the library. The duplicates that I’ve been shooting for the last year and a bit since the camera rolled over the counter. Turns out that Lightroom doesn’t like to have two files with the same name in the Library, even if they are in different folders.

Rats.

Now I’ve got to find a way to rename all those files without loosing the sequence that they where shot in. Thinking that it’s no big deal I was just going to run the files all back through the program that I use to copy them off the memory cards in the first place, since it’s got the ability to rename files on the fly I thought I could just append the date the photo was taken to the file name and that would give me my unique file names. Unfortunately Nikon Transfer ONLY works with removable media, and I don’t have any media that’s large enough to hold an entire year of photos. That would make the process of importing the files again something that would have to be done 4gb at a time.

There’s 100gb of photos sitting here.

Double Rats.

It’s almost enough to make someone wonder if it’s worth the time just to be able to use Lightroom. Unfortunately it probably is or else I’d just leave it.

So not looking forward to a long process I look through some of the old file rename tricks that I used to do, problem with doing it in dos is that it’s a long script that I really don’t want to write, and I’m not sure that I’ll be trusting a script that I find online with my family photos unless I really know what it’s doing. After a bit of goggling I wondered if PowerShell might be able to assist, and sure enough I found a script that I altered as below:

dir |Rename-Item -NewName {"YEAR-"+$_.Name}

This, when run in the working directory appends a given text string to the name of the file, so all my DSC-0001.NEF files now read 2004-DSC-0001.NEF, and instead of a long and ugly rename process I was able to get everything renamed in a matter of about 5 min. Moving forward I’ll be doing the date append as I import the files from the media cards in the first place.

I think I’ll be picking through PowerShell a bit more to see what it can do, anybody else working with this or using it in conjunction with our products?