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Help: DomainScan Setup
DomainScan help
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 Setup is divided into 4 main sections:
Client up
Behavior up
 Default database The name and location of the default database Mount automatically If checked, then the default database will be mounted automatically when DomainScan Client is started. Advanced Note: It's highly recommended not to disable these options Synchronize automatically If enabled, then DomainScan Client will automatically update the current view when the data from a new scan is available. Commit pending changes If enabled, then DomainScan Client will automatically pre-commit pending changes, so that the interface reflects the most current information. It is not recommended to uncheck this option. Default paths This option is only in effect if an offline database is mounted. In that case, DomainScan will not be able to identify where per-device files and log files are located. When this option is enabled, DomainScan will then presume that all files are located in the same folder as the database. If the database is located on a remote server then enter the name of the server in the box, and click on . DomainScan will then try to fetch the database location and name of the database and insert the name as the default database. Start Start with Windows Enable this option to start DomainScan when you log onto Windows. Start with Setup Wizard If enabled, then the Setup Wizard will be launched when DomainScan is started. Tray icon Show tray icon If enabled, then this  icon will be shown in the system tray.Minimize to tray If enabled, then DomainScan will minimize to the tray, and not the task bar. User interface up
 Appearance Week numbers in calenders If enabled, then all date pickers throughout DomainScan will show week numbers Device and user tracking and audit DomainScan is only capable of showing information from the last 14 days. In order to overcome this limitation, please consider upgrading to DomainScan Pro Main window Remember window size If checked, then DomainScan will remember the size of the main dialog. Show details in Dashboard If selected, then the Dashboard will show details about devices and users. Format device and user backgrounds If selected, then the background will be drawn with different colors. If disabled, then the background will only be white. Highlight servers If selected, then all servers will be shown with bold text for easier detection of servers. Show balloon tips When this option is disabled, DomainScan will not show a popup balloon tip when a device, user, monitor or news item is selected in the main window. When the option is enabled, DomainScan will show a balloon tip with information about the selected item – unless the overview panel is active, as the information is also shown here. Show balloon tips instead of normal tips Uncheck this option to disable the popup balloon in the main window. If the option is disabled, then a normal ‘Hint’ message will be shown instead. Information DomainScan is only capable of showing information from the last 14 days. In order to overcome this limitation, please consider upgrading to DomainScan Pro Field chooser up
 Here one can select the columns that are to be shown in the device and user windows in the main dialog. In Field chooser one can select whether to alter device or user columns.
The selection list contains two lists: Available and Selected. Available items are the one that are not shown in the main dialog, but one can add items by either double-clicking on an item or by selecting the item and afterwards pressing . Selected shows current columns and the order in which they are displayed. To remove an item from the list, either double click on the item, or select an item and click . One can also change the display order. To do this, select an item, and click on or in order to reorder the item.
Service up
Service installation up
DomainScan services
DomainScan consists of two parts, the Client and the Engine. The Client is the graphical user interface, and the Engine is the system that monitor and scans the network. The Engine is installed as two Windows Services, and consists of a Control engine (a watchdog service) and a Scanning engine. The Control engine is installed with default service permissions, and is responsible for making sure that the Scanning engine is running periodically and is running correctly. The Control engine must run all the time. The Service engine must be installed with privileges that allows for the service to connect and extract information from remote devices via the WMI interface. The privileges that allows for this is different for each version of Windows, but administrator privileges will always work.  Install For DomainScan to run correctly, DomainScan Service must be installed on one server in the network. The service must also run with privileges that at least grant read-permissions on the devices that are to be monitored, but full domain-admin permissions are recommended. To install the service, enter username and password and press . The status of the operation will be showed in the above 2 panels If no username is set, then the service will be installed with the default service credentials login (most likely Local System). However, this login cannot be used across the network as these credentials will not work on remote devices. Therefore, one must assign a username that can be used to access remote computers. Uninstall In case that DomainScan is to be removed from the server, then it is important to remember that the service must be installed prior to running the uninstall file to make sure that the uninstall process runs correctly. Settings up
 Scan interval Set the time of rest between network scans. By default, the idle time is 5 minutes, but any number between 1 and 45 can be used. Please note that the absolute scan interval is the idle time + the time a full scan takes, which will vary during the day, and this interval cannot be set. Watchdog DomainScan Service is monitored by a watchdog service (DomainScan Control Service) that monitors the state of the service, and is capable of terminating the service if it becomes unresponsive. By default, the watchdog service will terminate DomainScan 5 minutes after its last tick (which is executed often during the scan). However, on “difficult” networks (slow networks, networks with a complex topology, etc.), then 5 minutes may be too low, and one can increase the time that DomainScan is allowed to be unresponsive. Trend Graph If enabled, then the Trend graph file will be written with information about the number of devices, computers and users, which can be used to track network usage during time. Log settings up
 Event logs Enable event log (_events.csv) If set, then all events and notifications will be written to a common CSV formatted event file. The event file will be placed in the log folder. Enable per-device folders and logging (Events.csv in device specific folder): If enabled, then all events and notifications will also be written to a device specific event file. This file will be placed in [Other files]\Devices\[Device name].
Service log Enable service log file Enable this option to write log information to a separate log file. The log file will have the same name as the database, but with a .log suffix instead of a .gdb suffix. Add time stamp for each log entry If enabled, then each entry in the log will be prefixed with a timestamp that corresponds to the time when the entry was created. Log level A number between 1 and 9. Level 9 is the level where most information will be written, and is not recommended unless runtime-problems are detected that needs to be solved. By default level 3 is selected, which will write basic runtime information. Discovery up
 Discovery methods To gather device names on the network DomainScan can use multiple input interfaces, and all interfaces are enabled by default. Probe all devices in each scan cycle If this option is enabled DomainScan will try to scan every known device in each scan cycle, even devices that are not otherwise listed as online. This option makes DomainScan less dependable on the Windows network browser service, which in turn may lead to better network monitoring, due to the fact that DomainScan will discover more devices correctly. The downside of this option is that it may lead to longer scan times.
Windows Network The interface that will query the host server for a list of known computers and devices. Information, that is returned from this interface, will contain device names, domain and workgroup names for all devices that publishes itself to the network via the lan-manager protocol (used by all Windows versions). If the network is a Directory enabled network, then this list will also contain names from other networks that are trusted by the domain. Auto rediscover Device and Computer listsSet this option to instruct DomainScan to include online device in the next scan cycle. By using this option, one is less dependent on the Browser service, due to the fact that DomainScan will try to scan devices that are known to be online in recent time. A device will automatically be included for scanning for up to X minutes after it detected as online. X is set in Rediscover period option.
Network equipment, such as printers, switches and routers are normally not discovered by the Windows Network. To include these devices, or devices that are to be scanned regardless of their presence in the network list, one or more device list files can be created. For detailed usage information and details about device and computer lists, see Technote #3 on the GH Software website. Always detect host When this option is enabled then DomainScan will always make sure that the host server is found during device discovery. If the option is disabled, and no device lists are configured, then it’s up to the Windows browser service to provide the list of devices, which may not contain the host server. Devices to ignore The ignore list is used to define computers that DomainScan is to ignore. Any device or domain that is in the ignore list will be completely ignored by DomainScan Service. Advanced options up
 Worker threads Worker thread timeout (sec) Set the time that a worker thread can use to scan a device. If a lot of timeouts are seen on the network, then increase the timeout value. However this will also increase the overall scan time for the entire network. Concurrent worker thread To scan a device, DomainScan launches a worker thread that performs monitoring tasks. DomainScan can only utilize 1 or 2 worker threads. On larger networks this may result in rather long scan cycle time. This is in particular the case in the afternoon where a lot of computers are turned of. When this happens, a lot of timeouts will occur, and therefore extend the scan cycle period. To utilize more threads, consider upgrading to DomainScan Pro, which supports up to 127 concurrent worker threads. Allow multithreaded preprocessing When enabled then Windows network discovery will be multithreaded, which means that the host will search for devices in multiple domains at the same time. This may reduce the total scan cycle time with as much as 50% (especially in environments with a lot of workgroups). Options Ignore ‘ghost’ users on Windows NT 4 The WMI interface on NT4 devices contains a bug that causes the caller to be identified as the current user, if no user is logged into the NT device. Limit scan to machine domain If this option is enabled, then DomainScan will only monitor the same domain as the host server is a member of, and all other domains will be ignored. Example: DomainScan connects as domain\\admin but no one is logged into the device. Therefore, the WMI interface may return ‘admin’ as the current user. This option will cause DomainScan to ignore a local username, if the username is identical to the name that DomainScan use. Monitor the number of User sessions. If needed, then DomainScan can monitor the number of user sessions on a device. Server audit must also be enabled on devices where this monitor must work. User sessions are the total number of users that using a device – either by being logged onto the console on the device, or by being connected to the device remotely.
User detection fix The WMI interface contains another bug that was not corrected before Windows XP. The bug causes that users, without administrative rights, were not detected by the WMI interface. To correct this bug, DomainScan can be set to scan the device for a user using an alternative method. The method bypasses the WMI interface, and will normally resolve the correct username, unless the device is a terminal server capable device. Use LAN manager to detect computers and servers. The LAN manager interface, that is a part of the Microsoft network standard, provides a number of flags that identifies the role of a device. This list of roles can be read even if a device is otherwise locked down security-wise. If this option is enabled, then DomainScan will use these flags, if available for the device, to detect whether or not a device is a computer or server. Submit errors to GH Software In case that DomainScan Engine experiences a problem, then the error code will be sent to GH Software when this option is enabled. The information that is sent to GH Software is only used internally by GH Software to gain knowledge about the real-life DomainScan quality. TCP and Ping settings Prefer IPv6 over IPv4 If set, then DomainScan will try to resolve network names via the IPv6 protocol before trying the IPv4 protocol. Otherwise, IPv4 will be tried first. One may experience a slightly longer scan if DomainScan tries the lesser used protocol first. By default, a ping request will have a timeout period of 1 second and the ping will be retried once in case that the first ping did time out. Database up
Information up
This panel shows more details about the current database.  In Utilization (Always / Today) the number of computers, network devices and users are shown. The text to the left shows statistics for today, and the numbers are cleared by midnight. The select list is never cleared and shows the extreme value for each one hour interval. These numbers are cumulative numbers for all domains. See Domain settings for domain specific usage numbers. Location and backup up
 Database files Database store The directory where the database store is located. DomainScan supports online database file moving, so that it is possible to move the database without reinstalling or reconfiguring DomainScan. The database will be moved by DomainScan Engine at the beginning of next scan, and all necessary changes will be created manually.
Log files The directory where the log file is located. Use main directory If checked, then the log file / other files will be located in the same directory as the database file. This is the default behavior. Backup It is highly recommended that a backup strategy is implemented in case of critical errors, so that the database can be restored from an earlier backup. DomainScan performs the backup operation at midnight. Enable backup Check this to enable backup. The backup is performed at midnight each day. Folder The path where the backup is placed. Backup to date subdirectories If enabled (the default), then DomainScan will create a subdirectory to the backup location folder, and place the backup in this directory. This means that it is possible to go back to a specific date if needed. The backup-database file can also be mounted directly by DomainScan if needed. Example: If the backup is to be placed in d:\backup, and the subdirectory option is enabled, then backup from January 1st and 2nd will be placed in d:\backup\2006-01-01 and d:\backup\2006-01-02. Note: The naming convention follows the ISO 8601 standard Compress backup folder If checked, then DomainScan will try to enable file-system compression on the backup folder. The operation is supported on NTFS formatted disk partitions. Skip log file If checked, then DomainScan will omit to backup the log file. Recovery is still possible because DomainScan does not rely on the log file. Note: The event file will still be backed up if this option is enabled Truncate log file after backup If checked, then DomainScan will reset the log file (but not the event file) after a successful backup. Information up
About up
 This section shows information about the current version of DomainScan. The section also contains useful links for support and documentation. GH Software Connect up
 The Online section is a component that can retrieve news and update information from the GH Software Website Settings Enable GH Software Online To turn the component off, uncheck this option. Check for updates If checked, then DomainScan will periodically check for updates in intervals that are set in the interval list. Allow statistics to be collected If set, then DomainScan will send usage statistics to GH Software when checking for updates. The information that is sent to GH Software is only used internally by GH Software to gain knowledge about the real-life DomainScan quality. Fetch DomainScan Pro news If checked, then DomainScan Pro will show DomainScan Pro news in the “News” tab. Fetch DomainScan news If checked, then DomainScan will show DomainScan news in the “News” tab. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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