Reorganized and Re-written Documentation, Continuous Fixes and Enhancements
Inventu Viewer+ Base Product and Components
(Version: 6.0.88 March 2, 2023)
Inventu Viewer Documentation
- Installed documentation starting with the main help has been reorganized with many new sections which better support installation, configuration and administration of the Web Terminal Emulation environment.
- Added new help to support the Diagnostic Workbench and common support issues
- Added help to the Inventu Viewer Microsoft Management Console Snap-In now accessible with the F1 key or help menu options
Inventu Viewer Emulation Service
- Replaced the “Warning” column in reporting session details with the “WebSocket” column to better support understanding of network health. In customer situations where network components are impacting quality of service, web sockets are usually the best indicator of network quality. This column will display the following values:
- OK – The websocket is connected with no recent errors
- ERR-[n] – [n] Web socket errors have occurred since the session started. This number may be higher than expected if a session has been active for many hours. The session is still using web sockets so there has been healthy activity in-between the errors
- BROKEN – There were enough errors close together that the connection has been switched to AJAX web service calls. If many sessions have BROKEN it means there is a general failure in a network component somewhere in your network.
- API – the connection is for a server-side web service or other process (not FVTerm) and so no websocket is involved
- Added Event Log entry for when a 5250 device name is rejected by the host (this improves diagnostics for session initialization errors that only users could detect and report)
- Updated support for Windows Performance Counters including rename to Inventu Viewer Performance Counters from Flynet Performance Counters
- Updated SChannel TLS API calls to active structures (previous versions used structures that have been deprecated)
- Added Event Log entry for when a 5250 device name is rejected by the host (this improves diagnostics for session initialization errors that only users could detect and report)
- Improved automatic creation of data transfer and host device printing folders adding creation of “XFersFrom”, “XfersTo” and “SessPrintFiles”
- Metered license support was still using the HTTP port to communicate metering activity to the Inventu website—updated to HTTPS
- Some ASCII Viewpoint fixes for box drawing and cursor location limits
- Some internal synchronization calls had additional error checking implemented.
FVTerm Web Terminal Emulator
- View and Profile Access Control has been expanded to include Oauth2 OpenID Connect and SAML 2.0. Previous versions only supported access control for Windows Security and Google ID User Authorization. See the Profiles Mode Configuration for details.
- Function Key Identification was enhanced to support the pattern of a dash in addition to an equals and space following a function key name (F3-Exit is now highlighted for click like F3=Exit).
- Added ability to edit emulation style CSS files when accessing the FVTerm web application on the server (localhost). This is managed with a new Icon (color wheel magnifying glass) that previously enabled simply viewing a field’s active CSS style settings. With the new enhancement, administrators can edit click on a field to edit it’s active style as found in the selected color option (such as the standard 3270 style). Adding a new CSS file is still a manual operation where an existing CSS file is copied with a new name, then added with a text editor to the CSS list in web.config.
- For 5250 and 3270 sessions, a new option set in the Profile “Numeric Only Locking” will support host applications that have fields restricted to “numeric only” but in fact need users to be able to enter alpha characters. When Numeric Only Locking is set false for a profile, users will no longer be stopped from entering alpha characters (when true a user needs to override for each field set as numeric only).
- There is a setting “Clipboard Copy Mouse Activation” which has the default true—the timeout has been increased from ½ second to a full second to avoid undesired switch to the clipboard rectangle drawing. This is also now settable with “Clipboard Copy Mouse Activation Press Milliseconds” if more than a second is desired.
- The wrong HTML character name was being used for the dash/minus resulting in display errors for certain fonts.
- Websocket error handling tweaked to better capture exceptions
- Websocket errors now reported to the Inventu Viewer Emulation service to enable tracking of websocket / network health
Profiles Mode Configuration
- Changing the FVTerm Access Security Type in the Web Server tab will now set the User Connection Identity setting to match the optimal source based on the security type.
- For SAML 2.0 added “SAML 2.0 Security Groups Claim Name” defaulting to “groups” which enables identifying the identifier of the claim that represents a user’s group or roles membership.
- For OAuth2 OpenID Connect added “OpenID Connect Security Groups Claim Name” defaulting to “groups” which enables identifying the identifier of the claim that represents a user’s group or roles membership.
- Added “Obtain Security Groups from Provider” to enable control over the group lists used in View and Profile access control. This includes an option to utilize the Microsoft Graph API to obtain active groups from AzureAD as well as an option to define the list with the new property “Security Group Names for Access Control”
- Added “Security Group Names for Access Control” which is active when “Obtain Groups Names from Provider is set to “Manage Group Names Here”. This is a list that can be edited to define the group names used for access control to Views or Profiles.
Inventu Viewer Administration Console
- Active Sessions now report web socket health in farthest column to the right (replaces “warnings” which were generally of limited value)
Inventu Viewer Microsoft Management Console Snap-In
- Contextual help has been added so that the F1 or Help menu options can provide help on how to use the Inventu Viewer MMC snapin
- Active Sessions now report web socket health in farthest column to the right (replaces “warnings” which were generally of limited value)
- When updating a Cluster node the title of the dialog now reflects that action
- Added Server Actions to View and Repair internal Cluster User and Session Linked-Lists (Chains) to address rare situations where the Chains can be in error condition
- The Session Viewer (Terminal Emulator) can now have the host keys remapped the same way that the Recorder V2 supports (button at bottom of the screen accesses the keyboard remapping popup)
- Added Support for Accessing server management port using HTTPS — This was implemented to enable Helpdesk and other users to access the Inventu Service management port from other servers besides the localhost (on the server). At this time the Inventu Viewer Service HTTP port does not support HTTPS but Inventu can provide a simple configuration file for use with STunnel to provide the external HTTPS access.
- When adding a Server to the View, can now check that the Port is HTTPS
- When defining or updating a cluster, each server can now be accessed with a custom port and HTTPS
- The help for configuring STunnel at the server to front-end the FlyServer.exe console port has been added to the software.inventu.com help at https://software.inventu.com/help/html/stunnel/index.html
Notification Tray Icon
- On a live production server, active HTTP requests to the FVTerm Application Pool were causing initialization of the FlyServer service shared memory to fail during restarts (even when recycle of the FVTerm Application Pool is selected). The logic has been improved so that the FVTerm Application pool is stopped, the Service is restarted and then the Application Pool is Started back up.
Diagnostics Dashboard
- If an expected diagnostic folder is missing this version will create it and only display an error message if the creation fails.
- Exception handling added for startup Registry Reads that in some cases caused a startup failure.
- Continuing improvements including recommended actions based on discovered events and active probes
- Diagnostic Dashboard independent executable created that is downloadable by customers with older versions of both Flynet Viewer and Inventu Viewer-available on request to all Inventu customers with active maintenance or subscription.
ViewerLib API
- Added new read/write Integer property for the HostConnection Object: webSocketErrors which is now used by the FVTerm web process to report any issues with a connected client web socket connection.
FVIISApi Executable
- A little known utility primarily used by the Installer logic to identify and manage active IIS configurations was upgraded to support making it simpler for users to make FVTerm the default folder. This is documented in the new documentation under “making FVTerm the default application”. Button is “Update FVTerm URL Links” so that when FVTerm is made default the various menu options are updated when referencing FVTerm resources.