Where are all the CSC folks?

[Scott Folley]

It is feeling a bit lonely over here on the CSC part of the message boards.  I know there are more of you that are either using CSC or curious.  Fire some stuff out here and lets have a dialog!

And no I am not good about responding promptly but I am good about responding EVENTUALLY…  (the job does have a way of getting in the way of Clovertech but, then again, they pay me…)

Topic

[David Caragay]

Hi Scott,  We recently purchased a few licenses which we plan to deploy in the next few months.  Was hoping you may have some experience with actual prod use.  Any lessons learned you might be able to share?

[Scott Folley]

Yes, I have quite a few lessons learned.  Tell me about your setup and your plans.  We have learned a lot of hard lessons but I am a big fan of the product.

First off, I would assume that you are starting off on CSC 4.3.  Is that correct?

[Shaun Beckman]

I’ll jump in, and I look forward to being involved in a dialog with other CSC users.

We are on CSC 4.3 on a Red Hat Linux platform. We currently have 2 client connections and are on the verge of adding 2 more; with many more on the horizon. The first installation did not go as smoothly as expected (there is a learning curve), but the 2nd one went well. I have received no complaints from either client at this point…knock on wood.

I am a big fan of the product as well, and look forward to doing more with it than just sending unsolicited results, which is all we are doing at this point.

[Scott Folley]

Very cool.  We have clients on both CSC 4.0 and CSC 4.3.  In all we have more than 100 clients.  We have a smattering of those that are results only, adt only, bi-directional, and print.  We intend to do a wholesale move to RedHat on the server once we have gotten everything to 4.3 but moving them does take a while and there are only two of us.

I am not going to say that we have seen it all because that would be inviting the entropic demons to take their best shot, but we have seen many different scenarios.  In fact we see new and different ones just about every day and today was no exception.

Today on 4.3 we had a client that was not communicating with the dispatcher.  We have seen this before and it usually has to do with the performance counters but the pslist command was working which threw a new wrench into it.  I cleared out the performance counters anyways because that is the only other scenario that matched this and it had no impact.  Then I tried the old Windows standby of a reboot…voila!

I have to assume that the performance counters were corrupt in memory and the reboot took care of it but that is pure conjecture.  When windows is involved I consider all bets to be off.   😈

[Scott Folley]

The first thing that has to be made clear on our walk-throughs is the fact that CSC 4.3 needs several outbound ports to be open (by default 21200, 21201, and 21202).  There are a lot of overzealous folks in IT Security that will block these even for outbound communications and CSC 4.3 will not work without having them open.  There is another port (21207) that the client uses to talk between the dispatcher and the couriers but that is generally not a problem.

It is not possible with CSC 4.3 to deliver to a UNC path.  It actually was possible to do this on CSC 4.0 as long as the client service was running as the user that mounted the drive (instead of as SYSTEM) but that is not an option on CSC 4.3 anymore.

Off to a meeting, more to come…

[David Caragay]

We are planning on implemening 4.3 over the next few months.  We’ll be working with outside vendors and physician practices.  Was wondering if you had any issues working with private practices?  Did these practices usually have an on-site IT person?  Was there any issues with installing the client on their workstations/servers?  Were you recommending dedicated client HW or did they install it on systems that also ran other multiple applications?  Any thoughts would be great.  Take care.

[Scott Folley]

We have had issues installing the CSC Client on our client’s hardware.  The issues are not technical but more management.  For instance, we have had times where the client’s IT resource upgraded all of their OS’s to Vista which was not supported under CSC 4.0 and we were down for several months.

We have also had clients that wanted to do wireless.  While this is certainly possible, it is much more desirable to have a wired connection for the sake of stability.

The other thing that we do in connection with our installs is to use a “headless” system with no keyboard or mouse.  This way we skirt the issue of the client using the system for something else.  We install remote access software on the client machine and it becomes a highly supportable “appliance”.

[Russ Ross]

Jim and I keep asking to buy it so we can kick the tires and see how it drives.  

We think it is worth checking out but others think we are chasing windmills.  

In short, we want it but still didn’t get daddy to buy us a new toy.

Until we eventually get CSC, that is about all the dialect I can offer.

Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com

[Scott Folley]

Well, it drives pretty nicely but it doesn’t always handle well in the curves.  I would love to see more people adopt it because it is a great technology and the more organizations that have it the more we will all benefit with shared understanding.

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