E1 and Windows 2008 Server

I know E1 is not supported on Windows 2008 as of March 2008.

Has anyone experimented with E1 on x86 32-bit Windows Server 2008? I am curious to know whether anyone has evaluated it for Deployment server, Enterprise server, JAS server, development server, etc.

Any comments would be kindly appreciated.

Hi,

One of my customers, running E810 Tools 8.96.3.1 is
using W2008 64-bit as its Terminal Server (via RDP)
It works 95% OK, the 5% trouble comes from :

1. Unsupported printers, not all office printers have
64-bit drivers available, specially the ink-jet ones.

2. You have to disable UAC for the user that install
packages, it doesn't let you create the c:\windows\jde.ini

3. Local user profiles have to be removed from Control
Panel applet, don't ever remove them manually by
deleting the c:\users folder

4. Some fields are shown right-aligned instead of
left-aligned. We did all the R92TAM/R98CRTGL stuff,
no errors on the debug.log/jde.log, it's weird but
we can live with it.

5. All of your (server) hardware should be 64-bit
compatible, and low-level applications such as
antivirus, backup tools, drivers, etc... should be
64-bit compatible too.

Anyway, we found W2008 64-bit to be an excellent choice
as a Terminal Server platform for E810/8.96.3.1

The fact of running on 64 bits frees us from the
4 Gb limit typical of 32 bit systems (it's quite easy
to reach 4 Gb when you have 100 users opening E1 plus
MS Office plus Adobe Reader ...)

So you are not using Citrix the terminal server?
I am replacing my Terminal Servers/Deployment Server/AS400 and all associated MS licensing. To use Citrix I have to purchase all new licenses... Expensive!...

How is the performance only using WTS?

Hi,

The performance is great, though all my users are LAN, no one
is working via WAN.

Sebastian,

I am in the process of setting up my Windows 2008 Terminal Server for the E1 fat client. We want to use it for some basic admin stuff - obviously not the standard fat client.

We were trying to run the fat client via web. It worked great as long as we were in the local Administrators group. If we changed the permissions to Power Users, it quit working. It became clear that the problem was with registry permissions.

I reviewed some of my old documents regarding Windows folder and registry permissions. There are some specific documents that talk about registry keys and folder permissions.

Here's where things went crazy with Windows 2008. When we change the permissions to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT to give full control permissions to Power Users, regedit.exe removed all of the standard permissions and left only the permission for Power Users to have Full Control. CREATOR, SYSTEM OWNER, Administrators and Users lost all of their permissions.

Long story short, the registry permissions were fouled up and the app no longer works. We couldn't get back to our original state of working RDP due to the permissions issue. Thinking the registry change issue was a fluke, we reloaded Windows 2008 again. We did the exact same E1 installation. Lo and behold, the same registry change caused the same registry problem.

Besides this totally bizarre behaviour with registry changes wiping out the other users permissions, I am at a loss.

Long story longer, DID YOU HAVE TO MAKE ANY REGISTRY CHANGES TO WINDOWS 2008 TO MAKE JDE VIA TERMINAL SERVICES WORK?

Hi,

I'm sorry for my delay...
Regarding JDE E8.10 FAT client W2008 :

IT Admin made a trace of all the Registry keys necessary
to execute JDE FAT client without being a local admin,
it was a lengthy and painful process.

Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of that trace.

2. He also disabled UAC for the account used to install
FAT client on the W2008 box, UAC was stopping JDE.INI
from being written on c:\windows

Thanks Sebastian.

We did a processmon.exe on Win 2008 Server as well. When I noticed that HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT hive could not be accessed, we tried to give full control permissions to that hive. That's when things went crazy. Windows wiped out the standard registry permissions to HKCR for every group and account (SYSTEM, CREATOR_OWNER, Administrators, Users) except Power Users (the one we added).

The admin I am working with thinks this is a JDE problem since it needs permissions to the registry. I told him JDE has always required admin rights to the registry and that this works on a standard desktop Windows. As I have explained to him, the registry permissions getting wiped out is not related to JDE. My sense is that even if the permissions were changed before installation of JDE, the problem would still occur.

I am also curious if anyone has experience running deployment, logic, and/or web servers on Windows Server 2008. Right now I am planning an upgrade from 8.9 to 9.0 and have the option to use Windows 2003 or 2008.

We currently run our 8.9 system on all Windows 2003 with MSSQL2005 without any problems. The only reasons that I see for moving to 2008 for 9.0 are to utilize 64bit and for an easier OS upgrade if we would want to move to the next MS server edition (post 2008).

Is anyone running their deployment, logic, and/or web servers on 2008 who would like to share challenges/successes?

Thanks

I don't see any kind of certification for supporting a fat client on a server os. I am more curious in finding out if this is something several people do? Is this something you only do when you have a need for several users to have access to a fat client? I am speaking from a 8.12 perspective where majority of the users use the web client. We only have a need for 3 or 4 fat clients so we just have a couple of xp machines.

Re: E1 and Windows 2008 Server - SEBASTIAN: HELP!

Sebastian:

I know this is a stretch but is there any way you could find out the registry permissions on the HIVE HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT ?

Also, did you ever consider running the published app with a RUNAS command?

It would help finalize this for me.

Re: E1 and Windows 2008 Server - SEBASTIAN: HELP!

Hi,

I'm sorry, I can't disclose information from my customers.
On the other hand, I never tried running the app with RUNAS,
but you could give it a try.

Regarding Win2008-64bits, it requires Tools 8.98.1.0
It won't run on earlier Tools releases.

Re: E1 and Windows 2008 Server - SEBASTIAN: HELP!

Yeah, I'm 8.98.1.1 with Win2K8.

The devil is in the details. You are correct on the certification thing. JDE says that they won't support you. The reality is that at one time they would not "support" fat clients on Citrix at one time. And, up until about a year ago, they said they would not support E1 instances on VMWare. JDE often uses the certifications to protect themselves, justifably. JDE fat client was supported on terminal services up to the XML-spec based tools releases (8.97). The full fat client was supported on TS at releases prior to 8.11.

In our case, the purpose of having the fat client on Terminal Services is strictly for admin purposes (developer client only apps). We have about 25 users that need to go into OMW to see projects and promote menus/udcs/etc. If you have never done E1 on terminal services alone, then you might not have seen documents 626161.1 and 658143.1 - which describe registry issues with the E1 fat client.

Hi Jeremy,

The only W2008 64bit box my customer is using is this
Terminal Server machine to serve its FAT users (E8.10).

Their Deployment and Enterprise Servers are still on
W2003SP2 32 bits, and they'll be kept there until we
upgrade from Tools 8.96.3.1 to 8.98.1.1

Even if their Terminal Server is running a non supported
mix of W2008 64 bits + Tools 8.96.3.1, everything is
running fine except for a couple of minor issues such
as some fields being show right-aligned instead of left,
and long file locks on XLS attachments.

Their balance with the move from a bunch of FATs to
all users running on WTS environment is highly positive.

On the other hand, we all know it's a non-supported
platform and as such "we're on our own" until we
move to an "orthodox" mix of DB/OS/Tools releases.

I completely understand. My only reason for asking is because I would love to utilize this type of setup for our developers and cnc machines.

[ QUOTE ]
I don't see any kind of certification for supporting a fat client on a server os. I am more curious in finding out if this is something several people do? Is this something you only do when you have a need for several users to have access to a fat client?

[/ QUOTE ]

Jeremy,

I'm on a different release, XE, but I can give you a concrete answer for my environment. We use a third party scheduler, Tidal, to process our batch jobs. Tidal requires a fat client to run against. Our original agents were on windows XE desktops. That kind of hardware does not have the fault tolerance that we needed. That burned us once. We traded up to a couple of VM-ware sessions running on Windows Server 2003 R2. That gave us fault tolerant servers and a more robust OS for running mission critical batch jobs.

- Gregg

[ QUOTE ]
I am also curious if anyone has experience running deployment, logic, and/or web servers on Windows Server 2008. Right now I am planning an upgrade from 8.9 to 9.0 and have the option to use Windows 2003 or 2008.

[/ QUOTE ]

ARucker

We played around with Windows 2008 and SQL 2005 with E1 9.0 on our lab machines. It worked, but that's as far as we went with it for now. The project was halted for non-technical reasons.

- Gregg

Have you tried using RSC52.exe for this? It _may_ work differently...

Thanks Alex but I think we are going to give up on the registry permissions. The Admin I am working with says that Microsoft won't help. We are trying another option.

I was trying to setup XE on TS 2008.
I had tried about a month ago and ran into registry problems. I had then found a program to update the registry, the problem back then was i couldn't add the new user permissions just like that, it would remove the old ones and then add only the new ones so i had to do something to get all the old ones and news in place.
Ill look up the doc i wrote on it (i think i wrote one). IN the end i had it working. I suspect the admin guy might not know what he is doing and is screwing up the permissions himself.


I believe i had to downlaod a program called subinacl or something like that (unless that was already a command line tool for windows server 2008)
I then changed the domain name in Sheet2 cell E1 = whatever i wanted it to be
then i ran the scripts in column G of sheet to in command line or something like that.

I might have also granted domain users access to the jde files on the c: of the computer. and perhaps to the c:/b7 folder. the jde.ini file is mapped to everyone z: which is there own folder on a separate computer so i didnt have any problems with the jde.ini file.
We have 2008 running in vmware so i was able to take a snapshot of it before messing around wiht this stuff. I suggest its a good way to go.


Jeff