Re: [IUG] Millennium and Thin Clients

[Rick Cromi <rcromi at starklibrary dot org>]

Debi,

We are a consortia of 3 library systems that span 16 buildings.  However, only SCDL main, branches and Bookmobile department are using the Citrix farm to run the Millennium client (11 buildings/agencies)  Our 3 Citrix farm servers are all located at the central site.

As far as statistics are concerned, I really don't have much information in that area.  Part of this migration to III was to create a new ILS department to handle the daily operation of the system.

You mentioned the public in conjunction with the statistics and the public use a web browser to access the database.  So, what I do know is that the ILS people had set up various web logins based on IP address of the stations.  Our public stations are PCs and we set up the public segment of our LAN/WAN with different VLANs.  The VLANs are assigned different IP addresses per location.  For example, building 1 is 10.10.1.x, building 2 is 10.10.2.x, building 3 is 10.10.3.x, etc.  Therefore, when connecting to Millennium with a web browser, anything with an IP of 10.10.1.x logs in as web1, anything with an IP of 10.10.2.x logs in as web2, etc.  This should keep separate statistics for each.

Staff devices are the thin clients on Citrix and are on a different VLAN, but a similar IP addressing scheme is designed for the staff segment at each building.  As I mentioned earlier, we are having trouble getting the IP identification feature of Citrix to work in conjunction with Millennium.  However, for statistical purposes, each device logs into the circ account for its branch, so the statistics will be correct.

We do use receipt printers and barcode scanners connected to our thin clients.  Our PC guys handled most of this setup.  I'm pretty sure we use Metrologic barcode scanners and I'm not sure which model of receipt printer is being used.  I do know our guys had some trouble with the auto-cutoff setup and I'm not sure if they got the ILS people to answer their questions on how this is done. (... long, boring story, but we're a turnkey site and all support questions have to go through ILS to III support... IT isn't permitted to ask III support questions directly...)

As far as applications on the farm, we run the IE7 browser, MS Office Suite, the Adobe Reader, a telnet app and a couple of specialty apps, like the Ask-A-Librarian provider and some specialty viewers.  (a county agency has documents that can only be viewed with a proprietary CAD viewer... for example)  We're looking into expanding the software available on the farm as well as branching into "fat" clients running Citrix apps.  We're going to be testing the Citrix Conferencing Manager module pretty soon, as well.

Hope this helps.

Richard Cromi
email: rcromi at starklibrary dot org
phone: 330-458-3142

________________________________________
From: Krimm, Debi [DKrimm at aclibrary dot org]
Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2008 2:54 PM
To: IUG INNOPAC List
Subject: Re: [IUG] Millennium and Thin Clients

Rick,

Thank you for this detailed information.  Hope you won't mind my asking
a couple more questions.  We are a multi branch system and have setup
our statistical groups in Innovative to reflect such.  We are currently
running thin clients on our public side of the network and for a variety
of reasons we have one or more servers dedicated to each branch.  We've
tried but failed to have a server be shared by our smaller locations
because the statistics do not tally correctly.  Are you multi branch?
Have you had any problems with statistics?  What other hardware do you
have connected to your thin clients, e.g. barcode readers, receipt
printers?  What other software applications are you running on these
thin clients?  Thanks in advance for all your time.

-----Original Message-----
From: innopac-bounces at innopacusers dot org
[mailto:innopac-bounces at innopacusers dot org] On Behalf Of Rick Cromi
Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2008 2:54 PM
To: 'IUG INNOPAC List'
Subject: Re: [IUG] Millennium and Thin Clients

We just got up and running on Tuesday...
We've been testing it for a couple of months, but our tests couldn't
simulate several hundred users at once.

We have Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 installed on Windows 2003 R2 x64
servers.  We have always used a published desktop instead of
applications, as our users want to be able to run more than one app at
once.  We installed Millennium 2006 (150_06).

Our Group Policies caused a few issues, as we use File System and
Software Restrictions.  We had to get the permissions correct on the
jarcache and resources/<server>/330/eng folders/files.  There is still a
permissions issue with individual users with "old" profiles.  Not all of
us... just some.  Recreating the profile resolved this, but I think this
had something to do with the java config files in the user's profile.
We didn't quite track that down all the way as recreating the profiles
proved easiest and also trimmed down the bulbous profiles some users had
grown into.

We used to use a single login for each building's circ desks when it was
just a telnet connection to a text-based system.  With Millennium being
a java app, I thought it best to add a user for each machine to make
individual connections and work space environments.  Improves the Citrix
printer autocreation process, as well.  I also stopped redirecting the
user's Desktop in Group Policy, as I noticed that the java app uses the
desktop as a workspace for temporary files.

So far, it's been working well.
One issue I am still trying to resolve is how to use the IP
identification for the Millennium applications so that the thin client's
IP will show up in the "Restart a job..." section of the admin menu.
Currently, each job shows up with the farm server's IP address.

Hope this helps.

Richard A. Cromi
System Analyst
Stark County District Library
715 Market Ave. N.
Canton, OH. 44702
Phone: 330-458-3142
Email: rcromi at starklibrary dot org


-----Original Message-----
From: Krimm, Debi [mailto:DKrimm at aclibrary dot org]
Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2008 4:40 PM
To: IUG INNOPAC List
Subject: [IUG] Millennium and Thin Clients

Has anyone tried running Millennium on a Thin Client Server?  If so,
were you successful?


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