1. Chris Victor
  2. InfoMaker
  3. Tuesday, 17 March 2020 20:56 PM UTC

Occasionally when our InfoMaker 2019 users are working from home and they are connected to our office network via VPN, they can't access their reports because the pbls those reports reside in are on network shares and nothing is available under the network shares. They get the normal tree view with all their drives but if they click the plus to the left of the drive picture, nothing happens. i.e. no sub folders show up for them to drill down through. The plus just goes away. Local drives seem to work just fine. See the attached screen shot. This never happens when the users are in the office, just sometimes when they are remote and on the VPN. This happened occasionally in InfoMaker 10.5 as well. Had hoped IM2019 would fix it but it still happens. Seems to have gotten worse under Windows 10 and our new "AlwaysOn" VPN. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciate.

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Accepted Answer
Miguel Leeuwe Accepted Answer Pending Moderation
  1. Tuesday, 17 March 2020 21:45 PM UTC
  2. InfoMaker
  3. # Permalink

Hi,

I've seen this happening when working for a customer. Their group policies and shares were different depending on whether you connected remotely or internally at the companies office.

 

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  1. Miguel Leeuwe
  2. Wednesday, 18 March 2020 09:26 AM UTC
and then there's this: http://techlauve.com/group-policy-not-applied-to-remote-vpn-users/

I remeber us having to do gpupdate /force several times.
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Chris Victor Accepted Answer Pending Moderation
  1. Friday, 3 April 2020 19:39 PM UTC
  2. InfoMaker
  3. # 1

Turns out there was an issue with our new VPN. Drive shares (and any non-fully qualified server references) were not functional to ANYTHING, not just InfoMaker. I could have sworn the shares worked everywhere else. Mea culpa. Got it all figured out now. Thanks to all for your input.  

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  1. Miguel Leeuwe
  2. Friday, 3 April 2020 21:28 PM UTC
Glad it's working now Chris!
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Olan Knight Accepted Answer Pending Moderation
  1. Saturday, 21 March 2020 23:58 PM UTC
  2. InfoMaker
  3. # 2

One more wrinkle to this issue is when your users are connecting through CITRIX and the shared file mapped drive vanishes.

In every case so far, this has turned out to be with a mapping issue on the Citrix server or a rights issue where the user lost the right to see the shared drivee.


Olan

 

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mike S Accepted Answer Pending Moderation
  1. Friday, 20 March 2020 15:33 PM UTC
  2. InfoMaker
  3. # 3

I can't see how shared drives not working with your VPN is an infomaker problem.  VPN is basically a super slow local area network, so you should see issues with that.

You could use dropbox to share everything out instead of a mapped drive on your remote file server.  since dropbox syncs and downloads your files it will work great for you.  Just be super careful if you have people changing the pbls (reports).  Maybe only allow one person the rights to change a pbl, everyone else has read only.

 

The long term fix would be to store your objects in a database or similar repository and then download the objects to a local drive when you want to run/work on them.  Pretty much the same exact idea of source code control.  That would mean you would write a front end in powerbuilder, load everything down to a pbl when needed/changed, then have PB start up infomaker with the report the user want to run/modify.

 

 

 

Comment
  1. Miguel Leeuwe
  2. Friday, 20 March 2020 15:42 PM UTC
True,

Neither I think it's an Infomaker problem, (nor does the OP say it is). I guess the problem also exists from the windows file explorer. It's something their IT network admins have to look at.
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  1. Chris Victor
  2. Friday, 20 March 2020 17:48 PM UTC
no, file explorer and other apps function just fine with network shares while on vpn. our company uses dozens of apps and infomaker is the only one that sometimes has problems with trying to access network drive shares while on vpn. That's why our network guys are pointing the finger at infomaker.
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  1. mike S
  2. Friday, 20 March 2020 18:09 PM UTC
infomaker is most likely timing out waiting for response from the file server to serve up the pbl. This is an age old problem, PB apps running on network file shares used to have this problem all the time. I don't think your network admins can make it faster unless its the VPN machine not keeping up with traffic. I think it is more of an overall speed problem with internet/vpn/wan along with how pbls are constructed and its search paths.



I guess you could try making restructuring to make small pbls to hold the reports. Maybe get rid of any images too.



Or get the pbls / .srds on the local machine so you can load the reports on your local drive.



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Chris Victor Accepted Answer Pending Moderation
  1. Friday, 20 March 2020 15:14 PM UTC
  2. InfoMaker
  3. # 4

What's odd is if you shut down InfoMaker and restart it in the same VPN session, sometimes the drive shares will start functioning once again. If it were a policy issue, you'd think it wouldn't work ever.

Comment
  1. Miguel Leeuwe
  2. Friday, 20 March 2020 15:17 PM UTC
Sorry to hear that. Really I don't remember. We had lots of problems after IT switched our VM's and there were just so many shares, that "sometimes" it wouldn't be able to read all of them as there seems to be a limited space for the amount of shares.

I think your IT is your best hope to solve this problem.
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