The Spotlight : hardware

Tips from a Troubleshooter: Stealing the Spotlight

Sean Long — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:51:00 GMT

Hey,

My name is Sean, I work in Patron Edge Support and with Nicholai on Patron Edge and Patron Edge Online. I've contributed to blogs for Education Edge and Student Billing in the past, and now I get to stretch my legs and really explore the Arts and Cultural marketplace.

I've gotta say that I really like the people I've talked to already, and the market is very interesting and full of innovation and creativity. Personally, I've always been a bit of a nerd and I've been learning as much as I can about the networked environments that clients use to make Patron Edge, Patron Edge Online, and Patron Edge Kiosk work.

Over the next few posts, I hope to share some insights into the meat of how all of these databases talk to each other, and share some tips and utilities I've found useful for troubleshooting our software. As always, if there is specifics you'd want to know more about just leave a comment!

Have any tools (open source, other blogs, or otherwise) you use daily in an IT environment? Let me know!

Scanning on a Shoestring

Nicholai Burton — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:21:00 GMT

I know some of you have looked into getting Wireless Access Control for Patron Edge, and then reconsidered after seeing how much a quality wireless scanner costs these days. The Symbol MC55 is about $1000 a piece, and lower-end scanners tend to be less reliable in scanning successfully.

One of our clients recently became fed up with their scanners' lack of reliability and network connection problems. Instead of giving up on scanning, they found a clever solution that allows them to scan tickets for less than half the cost of a high-end scanner. How did they do it? They purchased cheap netbooks with Windows XP Pro, installed Patron Edge, and attached wired scanners. To scan, they launch ScanningValidation.exe so that it doesn't require a Patron Edge user license.

While this solution may not work for everyone, it's an easy way to do entry-level scanning. You can use it to figure out if moving to wireless scanning and purchasing high-end scanners makes sense for your organization. Laptops have legs though; I recommend either having very trustworthy volunteers to handle access control, or locking the laptop to some kind of permanent fixture.

How has your organization managed to meet your technical needs on the cheap? Share some advice in the comments.

Three Questions About Virtualizing Patron Edge

Nicholai Burton — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:59:00 GMT

I've been on upgrade planning calls with about a dozen organizations in the last few weeks, and several have asked about putting Patron Edge in a virtual environment. Three questions have come up repeatedly and I want to address them and give some food for thought when planning your next server hardware purchase.

Will it work? - The Patron Edge Quality Assurance team and several members of our Support team use VMWare to test multiple versions of PE at once, and it works perfectly. Keep in mind this is for the server side of things. While a virtualization solution will do fine on workstations as far as the program is concerned, I can't guarantee that your printers/scanners/card swipes will work flawlessly.

Is it slow? - In-house, I haven't seen a performance difference between a physical server and a virtual server with the same system specs. Several organizations currently use VirtualBox or VMWare because they can buy extremely fast servers and then split resources over several virtual machines. The bottleneck of a virtual machine setup is the hard disk, so be sure to read up on best practices to keep your virtual machines running as fast as possible.

Is it supported? - Server-side, it's absolutely supported as long as the virtual machine meets our system requirements. Currently, at least one organization has a fully-loaded server with a fast Linux distribution installed. They put Patron Edge and their other enterprise programs on virtual servers.

Supportability is only an issue is on the workstation side, and that is because we don't test peripherals on virtual machines. I have seen a Macbook, with a Datamax printer connected, running Patron Edge through VMWare Fusion and printing tickets without any issues. But if the printer didn't work in that setup, my Support team wouldn't be able to assist since we don't have that kind of computer hardware and it wasn't verified as working by the Quality Assurance team.

What other questions do you have about putting your Blackbaud products in a virtual environment? Have you been doing it for a while at your own organization? Leave a note for others in the comments.