Identifying Work Stations

[dennisw]

We are using Atrium and identify work stations by IP addess. We cross reference the IP address in a file to determine printer and other information.

Our networking department wants to use DHCP addresses that could change daily. IS there any other unique identifying information , such as PC name that can be acquired from the browser?

How do others identify work stations in Atrium?


Thanks.

[David]

A web browser does not pass any unique identifying information to the web server, by design. Aside from the IP address. The only way I can think of to identify the PC is by using “workstation ids”.

Of course you don’t have a real workstation device here, but Profound UI allows you to name the application jobs by passing the desired value on the URL used to launch the session. Basically, you would have to somehow generate a unique shortcut for each workstation that passes the desired id on the URL. So, the concept is quite similar to how you would setup unique workstation ids in each workstation’s Client Access sessions. Then the server side coding can get the job name from the PSDS or RTVJOBA command to see who is who. Of course, in Atrium each tab is its own job, but there is an option to allow duplicate names. This can be done because there is not an actual workstation device, it’s just a job name.

See here to get a sense for how it works:

http://www.profoundlogic.com/docs/displ ... ion+ID%27s

Do you think this sort of thing would work for you? Let me know if you think we are on the right track. This will still take a bit of doing on our part, as there is a little problem with this for Atrium…

Currently, you can pass the workstation ids when launching PUI sessions separately (outside of Atrium), but I don’t think there is a way to call up Atrium with a workstation id value and then have it pass the values along when launching the internal tabs/sessions. But, if you think this would be a good solution for you, we could look at improvements here. For example, we could probably make it so that you can launch Atrium like this:

http://server:port/profoundui/atrium?workstnid=ROOMA

And then it will automatically use ‘ROOMA’ as the workstation id for any tabs that are launched. Something along those lines.

Let me know what you think – this would require a bit of thought on how to get the right shortcuts onto all of the right workstations. I’m not sure if this will be workable for you or not. One idea is that you could have the user launch from a batch file that pulls the PC name or something and launches a browser, appending that as the “workstnid” parameter.

[dennisw]

I tried launching a session like this

http://10.1.96.7:8080/profoundui/atrium ... =WILLETTDW ( I created a desk top short cut and closed IE 10)

WRKACTJOB stills shows the Job Name ProfoundUI. Is this something you can only see in the PSDS or RTVJOBATR but doesn't show on WRKACTJOB?

[David]

Yes, that is the part I mentioned that won't work unless we make some improvement/new feature in Atrium. As I mentioned, you can currently name the job like that when launching the session outside of Atrium only. With that last example, I was sort of envisioning how it could work to see if this might be a workable solution for you before we go any further down this road.

What do you think? Would it be workable for you to somehow get unique shortcuts onto the individual workstations like that?

[dennisw]

I see how it works if a regular session. We use Atrium so unless they change Atrium to start this way it wont work.

[David]

Yeah, that's what I was wondering, if that would even be useful to you if we made Atrium capable of passing these parameters through to the sessions launched inside of it. Did you think not?

This would require changing the way Atrium is launched, but it's the only thing I can think of. The browser just doesn't have any identifying info on the PC so it has to be given a parameter like that. Of course, I'm not sure if it's at all feasible in your environment to control how the users launch Atrium.

[dennisw]

If Atrium could send those parameters we could set up short cuts for users with the appropriate parameter.

[David]

OK. I've logged a feature request for this, we'll see about adding it in a future release. I'm thinking that you will just call up Atrium with the 'workstnid', 'suffixid', and 'duplicateid' URL parameters as you want them, and then Atrium will just pass them along 'as is' when launching Profound UI or Genie sessions.

One idea to make the process easier for controlling how users launch it is that you could use a Windows batch file. These have access to Windows environment variables, like the Windows user and computer names. A batch file could make use of these by building in one of these values into a URL, and then popping open the browser. Of course, you are limited to 10 characters, though...

[David]

This feature will be included in our 5.0.2 release, scheduled for today.

[danielritzmann]

We currently have profound ui version 5.0.8.

You mentioned that this feature will be included from version 5.0.2.

Is it active in version 5.0.8 resp. can you tell us how we can activate or use this feature?

Thanks.