Latest Contributions by PaulDavidson1

Subu: It's a good time to answer Jack D's annual survey with these concerns. The licensing was confusing when AGOL first came out but I kept thinking it would clear up. I think I now mostly understand the licensing thanks to our account rep. ... View more

That's right, I recall prior discussions about Hyper V...  funny they weren't showing up in my browser. We also do a reboot due to those exact issues. We also have cmd windows that are left hanging around by pskill processes. Most of our servers are still on 10.1. & MSrvr 2008 R2 I do an automated reboot every two weeks which is usually sufficient. Every once in a great while, our main server will still go south on us but there's no rhyme or reason to it. It can happen ten days out, or 2 or 3 or ? days out.... How do you reboot your servers?  Do you do it manually? I set ours up via Task Manager but it was a real pain to get it working. ... View more

Aaron: This is very interesting. Too bad Esri dev wouldn't give out more info. If the server has enough RAM it should never have to swap to Virtual Memory. But it can be easy to use up RAM in ArcGIS. Maybe that's what it's all about. Even setting a big limit like 24GB, which would seem sufficient, really isn't and with the system managing the Swap file, it can grow as big as  needed. I had one question, are you using virtual servers? ... View more

David and Patrick: So you both are saying you found AD to be unstable and went back to pure ArcGIS roles? Are either of  you using Portal (the in house one, not AGOL)? Portal is suppose to play nice with AD and then push the security setting on down to secure servers. This has been my plan for a new design and hopefully 10.3.1 is better with AD? But if two large installations have jumped ship on using AD, it is something to consider! Thanks ... View more

What occurred to me was possibly errors on a hard drive? Or a drive beginning to fail? If I read this correctly, all errors went away when you moved to SAN storage? Were the prior drives local on hard boxes? just curious.... ... View more

What I've seen often is that you separate your source geodatabases that your data editors and ArcDesktop applications (Explorer, Map and Catalog) are accessing. (SDE..., although the word SDE still is used a lot, you no longer need an SDE server, just a database server and then drivers on the desktops of your data editors.) You then put your data into file geodatabases and copy them onto and register them with ArcServer. You can script updates to the file geodatabases with Python that run via Task Manager on some regular basis. You could write Models I believe but Python is much faster. Sounds though like maybe you are the only Desktop user and data base editor though?  In which case, forget a database server, use file geodatabases that are hosted on your ArcServer? Simplify your headaches.  I think this is what you're proposing? With a small town like that, I'd say leverage ArcGIS Online (AGOL) as much as possible. You could even let AGOL host your non-secure data if your budget allows. Credits are pretty cheap, named users not so much. What you're basically doing is outsourcing a lot of the IT side of GIS to AGOL. Where it gets a bit trickier is when you have secure data on your Win8 server inside your firewall. ... View more

VPN is the preferred way to tunnel into the firewalls from the DMZ. I'm having trouble figuring out how your security guys would say they have security concerns over VPN unless they just don't want any holes punched in the firewalls period.  (Or don't want the headaches of running a VPN server.) Obviously any route from the DMZ past the firewalls is a potential security breach. If you can avoid DMZ <-> Intranet then you're lucky but good luck with that in today's world! The more recent VPN connections that I've used that acceptable or better performance were done using VPN devices that came from the same company used in our network.  I.e. Using Cisco switches, etc... use a Cisco VPN product.  I don't know if that's a requirement or just that with enterprise stuff it's way easier and less of a headache to stay single solution as much as you can. We have a lot of iPads & iPhones with Cisco's AnyConnect on them and it seems to work fine. However, we have not used Collector (yet.)  Just the stock Esri ArcGIS iOS app and Esri Explorer. ... View more

In Sept 2012, Microsoft dropped support for TMG and in Dec 2014 (or was it 2013?) said: “We will continue to provide maintenance and support for Forefront UAG through the standard Microsoft support lifecycle, with mainstream support continuing through April 14, 2015 and extended support continuing through April 14, 2020. “ Probably fine to continue using it but perhaps not the best choice for a new implementation? ... View more

Hi Derek: Until reading this thread, I was under the impression that a named user was a named user. I appears though that I will now need to administer AGOL accounts to any user that wants to try ArcPro and administer a separate account for our Portal usage.  I can sort of wrap my head around this if I think Portal Name User and AGOL Named User (PNU vs. ANU) 1. Is it correct that PNU <> ANU ? 2. Is there any talk between Portal and AGOL in terms of administering Named Users?  i.e. if using a hybrid system, do I have to double administer Named Users? 3. Is defining our Named User licenses for Portal is just as murky as it is with AGOL when operating under an ELA?    i.e. We will have to negotiate for these licenses instead of just having them assigned to us based on our ELA cost? We now pay a pretty decent chunk of change for our ELA on a yearly basis.  My predecessor wasn't interested in AGOL so we ended up with only 5 Named Users at our last ELA negotiations.  But when 10.3 came out, we saw our AGOL Named Users bump from 5 up to 105. And at the same time, AGOL shows thousands of ArcGISPro licenses available to us. After talking with our tech/sales rep (same person, good guy) I was able to establish that the 100 new licenses were released to us for use w/ ArcGIS Pro.  In other words, we can only create ANU accounts out of that 100 user pool ONLY for users who are also using Desktop products.  These licenses  cannot be assigned to mobile field users.  And yet, I see Portal and AGOL as, at least initially, being most useful to us for mobile users. Good for Esri's pocket book not so good for my head and budget. 4. What happens if/when we start trying a hybrid AGOL/Portal setup?    I'm going to end up being the messenger that is killed when I go to upper management and say, hey,    remember this really cool stuff I've been showing and talking about, well, we have to pay for it twice. I know I am not alone when I say that it sure seems like Esri has overly complicated the entire concept of Named Users.  Especially if your organization has an ELA.  Thanks for listening and providing answers. ... View more

Jason: With multiple clusters, where you able to publish directly on the server rather than by linking from ArcDesktop? ... View more

Gary: You might already be aware of this but: One thing about the Python route, it will not be wasted effort. Esri is pushing python heavily, as they should. There are a slew of online python helps out there.  Most are general python... But Esri's Python help is quite good, not as a learning tool (except by example) but as a syntax tool. I always have a help window open to the Python stuff and a quick search usually finds correct syntax, etc... Also, you can build models (model builder) and then output the code as Python. It's generally not code you would want to run with but it will give you the syntax and functions/procedures/objects that you want to use.  And sometimes it will run first go.  But it's usually poorly structured. Finally, a lot of the Toolboxes in ArcMap/Catalog are now built with Python.  I believe the ones with the scroll looking icon are python.  And you can open the source code and have ready made templates. Best of luck ... View more

I can't see your documents but I do know that on our servers, we often have to manually open up the firewalls for port 6080... If it's a windows server, Administrative Tools: Windows Firewall with Advanced Security Look at incoming ports and make sure you have a rule that allows Port 6080  (assuming you're using the default ports) ... View more

Gary: I too am not familiar with current Esri/SAP interfaces. As I recall, this is a pretty new alliance, 2013 UC perhaps? Esri Partners | SAP | Overview At my prior job, we built a custom ArcMap tool that picked up selected features and passed them to a custom SAP BAPI via the SAP .NET connector.  I believe it then called up the SAP work order module to finish things off. It was a bit of a PIA truthfully that required some false starts. The biggest issue was the SAP .NET connector was really old (required VS 2003 I think, in 2010 or so?) A new connector  came out just after we finished the upgrade of the tool from ArcGIS 9.3 to 10.0 I was managing the programmer so my involvement was only skin deep. These days I would first look for an API from SAP & Esri. If that failed, then I'd look at doing this in Python as it appears SAP has Python interfaces available in various ways. RFC, etc...  Some folks talk about building a web service that you then consume... Python / ABAP Stack | SCN I believe a lot of how you go depends on your SAP implementation. And of course your ArcServer implementation. I do think the one thing you do not ever want to do with SAP is directly manipulate your database tables. You always want to work through the abstracted SAP interfaces. A behemoth like SAP does not move very quickly but one might think that two years later, you will be able to find tools that simplify a lot of this. Best of luck. ... View more