Latest Contributions by DavidHoy

Thanks Peter Knoop, I believe we will be able to find a purpose for such a dashboard at every one of our clients' ArcGIS Enterprise sites. As we all know, investment in GIS needs to be demonstrated as valuable across an organisation and management always loves metrics that visualise outcomes. ... View more

Thanks for this Bing, could you perhaps add a bit more detail, recognising that not every Centrify installation will be using the same fields for the information required by ArcGIS Enterprise.  ArcGIS (whether AGOL or Enterprise) requires a set of attributes within a SAML response: "NameID"  (this can be a string even though it sounds like it may be a number - this becomes your User Name in the portal - The allowed characters for the value sent by NameID are alphanumeric, _ (underscore), . (dot), and @ (at sign). Any other characters will be converted to underscores in the user name created within the portal. if you wish to align your user accounts in AGOL with user names in your own ArcGIS Enterprise, you need to have ArcGIS Enterprise add a suffix that is the AGOL Organisation's "short name" - this can be set in the defaultIDPUsernameSuffix property in the ArcGIS Enterprise portal's security configuration "Email" or "Mail" - the user's full Email Address "GivenName" (which may be the full name - depends what your organisation wants to see in the Portal's pages) "Surname" (added at 10.8 as an optional separate field) "Group" (can be a collection of group names of which the user is a member) - you dont have to create Portal Groups for every Group in this list, just the ones that are relevant to your site. When configuring the response Centrify sends to ArcGIS when a User authenticates,  Centrify administrator is able to map the internal attribute names (e.g. LoginUser.Email) to the"attributes" in the response (e.g. Email in your example). In Centrify's case, you need to check which of the inbuilt attributes are suitable to map to the "Groups" attribute in the response. As you show, there are two potential candidate attributes LoginUser.RoleNames or LoginUser.GroupNames - for your site, you chose GroupNames but this may be different at other sites. ... View more

Hi Jason, we are working in Oz with a number of Utilities, Power and Water/Sewer chiefly. These are in various stages of deployment. Some projects are enormous, encompassing a total Enterprise re-boot and integration with other systems, using dozens of consultants across the board. And others are small local government sites, some migrating from an existing small ArcFM system and others new to the WebGIS and looking to use their network datasets in ways that benefit the entire organisation. Jason, let us know some specific questions and we may be able to provide some insights (and potentially avoid some false starts). It would be useful to understand what your organisation has as existing infrastructure, software versions, existence of geometric network, experience with ArcGIS Pro. ... View more

Great start Bing Zheng, very useful to have this information collated in one spot. I look forward to the next installment where you tell us all what the samples do and walk through how they work ... View more

Héctor Meléndez With our site, we found we needed to drop the problem portal Item from the source Portal before export to be able to restore successfully to the DR environment and then manually re-publish in both. The next time we did an export/import, the process completed. ... View more

Thank you Noah for an extremely useful post. The recommendations regarding Load Balancer Health Check settings is especially useful as I have not seen these documented elsewhere. I like the recommendation to use Split DNS when you have a site with external users. Often, for simplicity, Network Admins choose not to do this, and we end up with internal users' requests needing to go out through the firewall to the DMZ and then come back in again. Most times, this isn't really too much problem, but sometimes, the organisation has a forward proxy and the web adaptor/load balancer address may need to be whitelisted. It can also add some extra latency to requests/responses. ... View more

FSx still working well in testing. We have discovered another undocumented feature that arose when using webgisdr to migrate from an older simpler architecture to the new - specifically regarding Portal Content directories. In the source 10.7.1 system, portal content was on a shared EC2 file server (as created by Esri CF template) - in the target (also 10.7.1), we had portal content in S3 instead of file system. This breaks webgisdr import. (confirmed by Jonathan Quinn). So, we have now changed to use FSx for Portal Content as well. This is working without issues in Test. but, for the size of this directory (~60 GB) AWS costs are a hundred dollars or so more expensive than using S3 would have been. ... View more

Héctor Meléndez‌ Hi Hector, did you get a resolution to this ?- I am seeing a similar problem. in the portal log I am seeing SEVERE The portal has been initialized and configured but is not accessible. The internal portal database does not appear to be running or accepting connections. Restart the portal machine or machines and if the problem persists, contact Esri technical support (U.S.) or your distributor (customers outside the U.S.). 2020-06-15T07:34:32,287 Portal Admin 10.0.1.242 218010 9852 SEVERE The portal has been initialized and configured but is not accessible. The internal portal database does not appear to be running or accepting connections. Restart the portal machine or machines and if the problem persists, contact Esri technical support (U.S.) or your distributor (customers outside the U.S.). 2020-06-15T07:34:31,462 Portal Admin 10.0.1.242 218010 9852 WARNING The specified path \\FILESERVER\data\arcgisportal\content\1592170018834 does not exist. 2020-06-15T07:34:01,106 Portal Admin 10.0.1.242 219999 9852 SEVERE Failed to import site. Failed to copy the content directory. 2020-06-15T07:34:00,786 Portal Admin 10.0.1.242 219999 9852 SEVERE Import Portal repository failed. Failed to copy the content directory. 2020-06-15T07:34:00,786 Portal Admin 10.0.1.242 219999 9852 SEVERE Failed to copy the content directory. java.lang.Exception: Failed to create destination directory \\FILESERVER\data\arcgisportal\content\items\00c891fe7cbf468fa2dbac37f3216573. 2020-06-15T07:34:00,784 Portal Admin 10.0.1.242 209054 9852 ----------------------------------------------------------------- I even tried running the importsite command directly from portaladmin using the same source .portalsite file. SEVERE The portal has been initialized and configured but is not accessible. The internal portal database does not appear to be running or accepting connections. Restart the portal machine or machines and if the problem persists, contact Esri technical support (U.S.) or your distributor (customers outside the U.S.). 2020-06-15T09:02:48,372 Portal Admin 10.0.1.242 218010 9852 WARNING The specified path \\FILESERVER\data\arcgisportal\content\1592175262535 does not exist. 2020-06-15T09:02:29,85 Portal Admin 10.0.1.242 219999 9852 SEVERE Failed to import site. Failed to copy the content directory. 2020-06-15T09:02:28,893 Portal Admin 10.0.1.242 219999 9852 SEVERE Import Portal repository failed. Failed to copy the content directory. 2020-06-15T09:02:28,893 Portal Admin 10.0.1.242 219999 9852 SEVERE Failed to copy the content directory. java.io.IOException: An unexpected network error occurred the bold SEVERE error is the one that is the cause of failure in the second run. The source and target environments are 10.6.1 and both in AWS (different accounts) I have plenty (>100 GB space) left on the destination drive. I just checked - using the same account as the one running webgisdr, I am able to create new folder (just as had already happened for hundreds of other items. I am wondering now if the item being restored is incompatible with the target portal. or maybe - the index on the source portal was not up to date when webgisdr export was run?  and there are entries in the index that dont actually exist as items? ... View more

Hi Steve, sorry I missed the notification that you had posted. We are trialing the use of FSx for another large site in NSW. But we are using this only for the ArcGIS Server System directories, still using DynamoDB for ArcGIS Config store. So far, the simple testing we have done shows no significant performance hits for simple map export and feature query. So far as I am aware, there is not an "unsupported" flag on using this - the doc only specifies that a file store for system directories must provide high performance read/write and not wait until change is committed across all nodes (which is why you cant use a DFS based system, FSx supports acting as a node within a DFS cluster, but doesn't use DFS concepts itself). As I am sure you are now aware, all AWS instances need to be part of the same Active Directory domain as the FSx share (we are using AWS Directory Service for this) ... View more

Thank you Taylor, I will be taking the major elements of this idea as part of our migration of a (large) site from one AWS account to another. Particularly grateful for the tip about the need to set up the private zone in the source VPC as well to allow this site to continue running after the switchover of public addressing. ... View more

Hi Michael, you may have already received this answer from Support, but I will post here in case others are interested. In an AWS Autoscaling group new EC2 instances are launched and added to your ArcGIS Server site as a result of a Cloudwatch monitored load threshhold being passed or the administrator altering the Max Instances setting for the group. When this happens, a new instance is deployed using the AMI associated with the "Launch Configuration" for the group. The new instance is associated as a target with the Load Balancer and then runs any "UserData" steps. If you created the Server using the Esri supplied CloudFormation templates, the UserData includes running the Chef recipes that add the additional ArcGIS Server machine to an existing site. The AMI used is the Esri supplied image. These images are generally only supplied for new version releases. So, you will need to create your own AMI, by launching a new temporary instance from the Esri supplied AMI and manually installing the latest ArcGIS Server patches on this image (you may also decide to install Windows Updates). Once patched, save as a new AMI in your own S3 bucket. (and shutdown your "gold" instance). The next few steps come from a support ticket This is assuming you have a "file server" as created by the Esri supplied HA ArcGIS Server CF templates. This was also created using the same original AMI (this includes ArcGIS Server pre-installed), and is a cunning trick to temporarily keep the ArcGIS Site "live" while removing and recreating the servers in the Autoscaling Group from the "new" AMI. Hope this is useful - there is a bit of manual AWS config work to be done there. ... View more

Thanks for the link Frankie, Do you have a running HA ArcGIS Enterprise site using SoftNAS as shared directories file server? did you do any objective comparison tests ? ... View more

Hi Joe Catanzarita‌ do you know if any patch was every written from Esri side for this - or is there a particular Chrome patch that has resolved it from that side? ... View more

Hi Josh, I am not certain, but As OFS is based on using S3 as its backend storage location, and I think EFS is using EBS - I think OFS actually works out cheaper for a small number of fileserver nodes (that only need to be small EC2 Linux instances). Of course, you will need to do the maths for your own situation. ... View more