Today I would like to explain a little bit what Session Stores are for the NMAgent and, therefore, what a Personal Session Store is. A Session Store is a database table that holds the information from your Agent Sessions when you have tell him to do so. Every run command invocation fires a new Agent Session and you have the option to persist the results in a database if you issue the -save parameter as well on the CLI.

Since version 4.54b0 you can choose your Session Store and define its name on your Profile Settings. Consequently, you will notice that several new parameters are present in all your settings-<ProfileName>.ps1 files. These are:

$AgentUserId           = 18              # My OpenSLIM Contact UserId
$AgentUserName         = 'cveira'        # A label to distinguish my Sessions
$AgentUserSessionStore = '_SessionStore' # The table to store my Sessions

These parameters become useful when you share your Session Database with one or more IT Teams. It is also handy when you schedule NMAgent sessions for regular execution and want to distinguish the automated sessions from your interactive ones.

The default Session Store is _SessionStore and this is the reason why all the predefined Profile Settings refer to it.

Continue reading …

Some weeks ago, we have run into capacity issues in a server farm that provides services to a Computational Grid. This farm run Windows applications and, due to historical reasons, those applications were hosted on the system drive. That configuration have worked for some time, but, finally, we faced the need to move the whole solution to a different local drive. The question, then, was plan simple: how can we accomplish this task without affecting both the application behavior and the production service?

The answer to this question is also simple: NMTools + PLEX modules. The basic idea was already noted in an article I wrote a year ago: “Possible uses for PLEX modules”. Many improvements have been done since then, but the core concepts still apply.

The strategy, then, is to set up a hard-link from the original location to the new one. To achieve this, we will use the capabilities of the PLEX_RunWinCmd module that lives on the remoting library.

The Solution

If your target systems are Windows 2008 or higher you can use a local tool to place the hard-link: mklink. But, If they are Windows 2003, we will need a tool to do it.

Continue reading …

Well, here we are again! :D. This is a much long awaited release. Definitely, this product is becoming more and more mature with each iteration. I can now say this from the experience of running NMTools on big and complex Production Environments to solve real problems and handle considerably demanding situations.

There is a lot of hidden work that has been done during the last eight months. That is why I would like to start thanking all the people that has contributed to this release in any way: code, feedback, ideas, etc. This release wouldn’t be as good as it is without you.

Having said that, let’s go and see what’s inside this version:

NMAgent new features and improvements

• Support for SQL Server as well as MS Access back-ends.
• NMAgent will default to Trusted Authentication when no identity is supplied on the profile settings.
• SessionStore schema has been extended to allow DaX (Dependency Aware eXtensions) modules and enhance the user experience on multi-user environments.
• Personal user SessionStores can be defined as part of the profile settings.
• The OpenSLIM UserId can be defined as part of the Profile settings. This will reflect the user identity when persisting information on the OpenSLIM database.



Continue reading …