Administrator alerts
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Situation—Instead of shutting down an environment, an agent can be designed to alert an
administrator or operator to determine the status of the user before taking action. This watchdog
approach can further be defined to exploit redundant network connection support to a remote system
to allow user-directed shutdowns to occur.
●
Benefit—System agents are not required to take destructive action—they serve only as alarms and
monitors for alternative human intervention.
●
Issue—May require redundant networking channel. Requires administrator or operator availability to
support.
Anticipating user disconnects and reconnects
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Situation—Users must first be warned about the consequences of disconnection. Agents that provide
protection for a disconnected session may become a nuisance for unsuspecting users if they fail to
address protective measures in place for their safety. For example, users must know how much time
they have to reconnect before safeguards take action. If a remote agent arms itself for application
termination, users should be presented with a large, unmistakable disarming "opt-out" panel that, upon
login and discovery, they can halt any agent actions before termination. Organizations should carefully
discuss and publicize safety measures due to potential data loss.
●
Issue— Users should not be able to disable or specify their own timeouts due to potential irreversible
data loss.
General agent design guidelines
In developing an agent, HP recommends following these guidelines:
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The agent should externally log its decisions and actions for postmortem analysis.
●
Independent agents should provide their own opt-out, disarming dialogs with countdown feedback
before taking action.
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Expect the unexpected—where possible, limit your actions to those areas you are certain of the
outcomes to minimize loss of data and productivity.
●
Always inspect error codes when reading event logs—the reliability of this RGS communication method
depends upon the Windows Event Log system. While we have yet to see a failure in this path, we
recommend using all information available to its fullest potential.
Additional features for Windows systems
The following optional procedures for the RGS Sender service can improve the reliability of your remote
agent solution.
RGS Sender Service Recovery Settings
This section discusses restart options for the RGS Sender and possible interactions of the agent with the
remote computer.
By default, most Windows services are installed without any automatic restart/recovery settings. This means
that, when a service terminates, Windows will, by default, not restart the service unless explicitly set. When
RGS Sender software is first installed, it is installed with the Windows default (do not restart).
Restarting the RGS Sender service can support RGS reconnection with a RGS Receiver client (unless a system
error prevents the RGS service from restarting).
70 Chapter 8 Advanced RGS features
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