{"id":892,"date":"2014-09-29T20:31:49","date_gmt":"2014-09-30T01:31:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/danvanfleet.com\/?p=892"},"modified":"2014-09-30T22:03:36","modified_gmt":"2014-10-01T03:03:36","slug":"proform-emergency-system-when-now-what-how","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/danvanfleet.com\/index.php\/proform-emergency-system-when-now-what-how\/","title":{"rendered":"ProForm Emergency System, when, now, what, how…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"image\"<\/a>This past weekend was an interesting one. Not only was it my birthday, we had an Enterprise 6.3 client’s SBS 2008 R2 server have 3 of 6 drives in a RAID 5 array in a pending error status. There was serious talk of a punctured array.  It’s a small business so it not only was it the sole active directory provider, it also managed DNS, DHCP, and SQL servers not to forget File and Print service. The IT staff was busy rebuilding arrays, drives, and restoring backups, time estimates for data transfers were given in half days. About a day and a half and this job should be complete. Then it failed, another day long attempt and failure had the calls out to put Option “D” in place.<\/p>\n

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Option “D” was a hastily thrown together thought experiment, one of those if all else fails, this might keep us going solution. It was to provide a temporary ProForm environment complete with lookup tables and templates, along with this years data files and this years soft file folders. Since it was a Plan 4, no budget was allocated for trial or testing. The direction was you’re smart, copy what you think you’ll need. And by the way gather quickly, the server is going to be rebooted in a little over an hour. It helped that we knew the network well.<\/p>\n

The preparation process was pretty simple, grab the shared SoftPro folder, SQL data and file data, then copy it somewhere else. The first interesting thing was, the SoftPro folder has grown over time with various folder being used as temporary folders. With the time constraint in place, we didn’t want to copy all that data. We didn\u2019t need reports just the critical folders, Data<\/strong>, Merge<\/strong>, RdyDocs<\/strong>, Templates, Tools<\/strong> and the contents of the root of the SoftPro shared folder. (A note on those folders, even though it’s big, grab Setup<\/strong>, it comes in handy, we also had another unique folder Overlays<\/strong> that we copied.)<\/p>\n

There are things to consider when attempting a maneuver such as this, we invested mere minutes into those considerations. Here we take a look at some of the things that come up when slapping a temporary ProForm solution in place. Somewhat in the order in which we saw them.<\/p>\n

Versioning<\/h1>\n

ProForm validates the correct version between the client and server based on 2 files, the first lives in the %WinDir%<\/strong>, usually C:\\Windows<\/strong> and is called SoftPro.ini<\/strong>. It looks like this<\/p>\n

[Setup]\nServerDestDir=\\\\Granite\\SoftPro\\\nServerInstallerType=Wix\nVersion=6.3.61120.0\nSrcDir=\\\\Granite\\SoftPro\\Setup\\1\nClientDestDir=C:\\Program Files (x86)\\SoftPro\\Enterprise\\Client\\\nClientInstallerType=Wix<\/pre>\n
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