Bozteck takes pride in making complicated tasks simple.  That has been the philosophy behind VNCScan for the past 13 years.  We’re making some really COOL changes to the product to do just that.

Historical Overview

When the first versions of our VNC Manager were released way back in 1999, the data was stored in a Microsoft Access database.  Despite the popular (and often justified) opinion of Microsoft’s Access database, there are some applications that use data “just right” for that platform and VNCScan was one of them.

After frustrations with requiring multiple runtimes for Access, the decision was made to move the data to an XML format.  A lot of code was written to manage that process smoothly on the thousands of existing VNCScan installs deployed all over the globe.  The XML format has been working pretty well over the past 10 years but there are some pretty serious issues that the time has come to address.

Issues with XML Databases

The largest sacrifice of moving to XML was the ability to share one set of data with many administrators.  When the back end was database driven, multiple computers could pull from the same data at the same time with very good performance and reliability.  After moving to flat XML files, doing so often led to groups disappearing and data files that became corrupted so badly that it prevented the program from starting up.  We had to remove any support for sharing data with XML. because of this.

For example, if John and Mike both point their VNCScan consoles at the same data location, they will constantly be stepping on each others changes.  An XML file must be read into memory, modified, then placed back onto the disk as a complete file (overwriting whatever is there).

If John reads the data into his console, then Mike makes a change to the group, and then John makes a different change to HIS copy of the group, Johns change will wipe out Mikes change even if they change different properties of the group.  If they both try to write their changes simultaneously, they end up with a corrupted XML file.

The Great Database Debate

A while back, I made a blog post asking opinions of using an Access back end verses using a Microsoft SQL Server back end.  I received a lot of emails with great responses from so many of you!

On one hand, the Access database format needs to be compacted and repaired from time to time to get rid of orphaned data and “white space” in the database.  It also does not do well with a lot of threads hitting it at the same time.

On the other hand, Access is a very portable database format that requires no runtime (any more) to use in your program and holds up well with the type of data accesses that VNCScan performs.  I’ve also taken performance heavily into consideration with each line of code that I have written to mitigate any “over use” of the database.

If we were to use a SQL database, we would need to deploy the Microsoft SQL runtimes (MSDE) or require that every customer has a SQL server on premises.  For the style of data that VNCScan employs, both of those options seemed like overkills at this point.

The Future

The initial database version of VNCScan will be backed by a Microsoft Access database.  The code was written in a way that will make it VERY easy to port it to a SQL database in the near future.  While we have tested VNCScan extensively on the Access database, we will be watching “wide eyed” for any indication that the platform isn’t good enough.

I believe that by June, we will have a version that will have a choice between Access and SQL. We’re only releasing the first version as Access based to cure the ills that plague the XML.  Even with its shortcomings, Access databases are a hundred times better than XML.

The Beta

We are in the final stages of “dog fooding” the database version.  That means that we’re using it internally so that we feel any hardships before the beta testers do.

Within the next day or so, you will see a bog post with instructions and a link to try the beta.  I strongly suggest that you back up your <My Documents>\VNCScan folder before installing the beta.

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If you would like to beta test, you can download it here.

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What’s New?

• Fixed the Windows Logon (mslogon) in UltraVNC fo x64 – When pushing a deployment of UltraVNC to a remote x64 system, the mslogonacl.exe tool was refusing to apply the correct permissions.  This has been fixed.

Download Here

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Important Information

There has been a serious integer overflow vulnerability found in the UltraVNC viewer with versions 1.0.5.3 and earlier. There is more information about this vulnerability at Core Security.

Notice that this is for the viewer only. The server is not affected by this bug.

Solution

The easiest way to upgrade the viewer is to upgrade to the latest release of VENM Console. This version uses the patched viewer and is safe.

Alternatively, you can manually update your vncviewer.exe by performing the following steps:

1. Download the zipped viewer here
2. Unzip the vncviewer.exe into the following places:

• “C:\Program Files\Bozteck\VNCScan Console .Net”
• “C:\fastpush\vnc7\ultra”

Thank You,

Steve Bostedor
Bozteck VENM Support

http://www.vncscan.com

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What better way to bring in the new year than a new release of VNCScan, right? We took some of our most requested features and rolled them into this update release. Here’s a run down of the release notes for this release:

2009.1.1

• New: Background pinging! Now you can always know when your computers are available or when they need to be booted up before connecting to them. You can keep track of the last time they were polled and the last time that the computer was seen on the network.
• New: Logs the last access time and date and places it in the main computer list for easy access.
• Fix: IP addresses now sort properly
• More fixes and minor enhancements

We wish all of you the greatest year ever!

Thank you,

Steve Bostedor
Founder and President

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The next release of Bozteck VNCScan Enterprise Network Manager (VENM) is almost ready to roll. We just need a few more people to test it out in various environments before we press the “Go” button.

It really is a stable release just waiting in the gates, so I encourage anyone who wants to test it out to please let us know in the forms located here.

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We’ve completed the initial phase of our website redesign!

In the next few days, we’ll be editing all of our old pages with redirects to the equivalent page at the new website. Some of the pages already redirect property and a few of them (like the main home page) automatically do so after a second or two.

We want to keep the old site in place for a while to let the search engines catch up with the move. After about a week, we’ll move all of the old pages into an archived subset of our new website for historical purposes only.

We’ve painstakingly recreated every page on the old site in the new design so that all of your important information is still there in the new one. The first advantage of the new site is the great site-wide search function.

The move was done for a couple of reasons. First, our old site was looking pretty aged. It was created by hand in static HTML. It has been tiresome to edit and keep up to date because of this. I think that the design looked OK but it was based upon Windows XP – which contributed to the “yesterdays web” look.

So, we moved to a CMS based upon Joomla 1.5. It was a significant learning curve but I was able to draw upon the knowledge of people smarter than me to get me on the right path. I am immensely greatful for everyone who has helped me switch paradigms into the world of Joomla.

Now that the initial change-over phase has been completed, we can start looking for ways to make the website more interactive and social. I’m very excited about the possibilities. There are so many smart and talented people using VNCScan in ways that I never imagined. You guys deserve a website that can let you share that knowledge and help each other out.

Any comments on the new website will help steer it’s direction.

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The current release of VNCScan has a working beta method of deploying UltraVNC version 1.0.4 to Vista computers! We are the first to market with this feature!

While 90% of it has been fully tested and working, there are still some minor missing pieces that you may run into. We don’t know what they are so we’re relying upon you to let us know what you find.

Here’s a quick run-though for deploying UltraVNC to Vista in the upcoming version 2008.6.1:

1. Launch the deployment wizard as usual
2. Create a new profile and select “Ultra104″ as the version
3. Set a VNC password (even if you’re going to use MS Auth)
4. Blow through the rest of the wizard answering questions as you see fit.
5. Watch the deployment process – some errors in the script are normal but others can mean things went badly.

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You will want to make sure that Network Discovery and File Sharing has been turned on for your Vista computers. A firewall and stopped services can keep the good guys out as well as the bad guys.

If things didn’t work, please post the output of the script here, editing out anything that you feel that you can not freely share on a forum post.

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