Thin Clients Updated, Support Portal New Features

The new thin client update has now been deployed to nearly all of our 500-ish devices and I'm happy to report that we had no major problems.  In the past when moving code out to a larger group of users, someone would find something that was missed during the beta testing.  But so far we've basically had no calls at all about the workstations.  All types of connections (X11, RDP, Citrix) are working as expected and are incrementally better than the previous build.  Very happy to have this project finished and the improvements in the hands of the users.

Our in-house support portal UI was hitting some limitations as I mentioned previously, and I had some time to go in and change the bar graphs from being an image to actually being individual widgets that I can control in the software.  This allows direct control of individual elements and also unique tooltips on each bar tick.  Previously we were monitoring CPU, user counts and printer jobs.  Once the code was updated, it was super easy to add memory usage and disk usage.  The shot below is the current UI, still work to be done with positioning and cleanups but it's working.  At a quick glance, all of us in IT can see the exact status of many of our Linux servers.  Next up will be adding the rest of the Linux servers, and then I'll add the code to do the same polling to our Windows servers.  The little bits of time used to improve this software is easily recouped in staff time after the new features are deployed.  The end user experience is improving too because now we know about issues before they are even noticed.

Current projects: The new hardware has arrived which will run our email upgrades; starting to get the OS installed and testing.  Awaiting LibreOffice 3.6.  Looking at scaling issues related to more Firefox sessions if we move to web based email.