Inventu Viewer+ Software Updates

Inventu Viewer+ Base Product and Components

(Version: 6.0.105 February 28, 2024)

FVTerm Web Terminal Emulator

• Minimum font size is now supported for both minimum font width and height in pixels. For 132 column screens that are typically only 80 columns, the user can now set minimum font width and resize the browser so that just the 80 columns are visible.  The characters will now be readable and a horizontal scrollbar will appear to enable scrolling to the right or left.  For 43 row screens, the same feature using minimum font height will introduce a vertical scroll bar if the screen is not tall enough to display the characters without “squishing” them.
• Websockets recovery has been improved in a compromised network situation.  Additional logging has been added as well as a user option to restart using a websocket after “too many errors” have switched the user back to Ajax / long polling.   Automatic recovery of a websocket connection now occurs after detecting that the network health is back to baseline.
  • On load of the FVTerm page, a baseline Ajax call is made quickly 5 times and is used to establish expected response times. Example is that between a Boston area PC and an Azure-East VM this typically averages in the 35ms time.  Note: this is logged to the client Websocket log accessed with the Status popup.
  • When a websocket failure is detected at the client, prior to a restart attempt on the websocket (if retry count has not been reached yet), the websocket log is sent to the server and logged in the FVTerm Logs folder with the name “BrokenWS_[session Cookie name].log – if a session has multiple breaks, the logs will be appended to this file. These logs can be provided to Inventu support to assist in identifying network weak-points.
  • Websocket retry construction timeouts have been reduced from 20 seconds to 10 seconds by default and is now a configurable Profile setting. In a healthy network the construction of a new websocket between a Boston area PC and an Azure-East VM is in the 100ms range.  In an unhealthy network, tests have shown the construction of a websocket frequently fails even when Ajax calls succeed (with higher response time).  So having a long timeout probably hurts user experience more than it helps.
• The network status popup (accessed from the settings dialog or by clicking on the “Ready” in the status bar) has improved usability with clickable lines styled like buttons. It has added a button to reconnect a Websocket if the active websocket status is “no” (broken).  Users should be taught to use this during problem times as they can also report problems and when doing so send-in the active websocket log.
• Initialization of the FVTerm application in IIS on rare circumstances could start without synchronization and access to the licensed features identified in the Inventu Viewer Emulation service. This has been fixed to ensure coordination between the two on licensed features including Identity framework.
• IE11 was broken in Version 6.0.101 due to use of more advanced Javascript—this is now fixed to avoid breaking IE11 for those still using it (our customers can’t control all of their users!).
• The new Message Based API was not reading the contents of Entry fields in the GetScnText() call, which has been fixed.
• AzureAD security would not re-authenticate users after their tokens had expired—this has been tightened with this release.
• Lost Session timeout added so that if a client closes the browser a session can be disconnected within the timeout. This helps catch situations where the browser closing provides no event notification useful for closing the session.
• If the “profilesFolder” entry is missing or invalid in the web.config file, this is now detected and reported.
• OpenID security use of the Microsoft Graph API for user group membership tweaked—the initial support would read all groups in Azure which can number in the thousands in many organizations. The openID Graph query will now only request Security group names only, which should make the returned list more manageable.
• Logging for OpenID security is optional, and when active, sensitive entries such as the connection secret are now masked when logged.
• Improved userID management so that user identity is more consistently captured from IAM logons (this is related to the userid shown in the console and used for server-side storage of users settings when active).

Inventu Viewer Emulation Service

• Added new support in specifying the LU for a Pooled session—the new syntax implements a “range” in the LU / Device Name template. A template includes the ability to add the session ID (starts with 1) to a provided number.  For example, “LU|d6:3|”  means add 3 to the session found to be available, meaning LU names of  LU000004, LU000005 and so on.  The new option replaces the “3” with a range.  This means that the first assigned will have the first number in the range regardless of the found session ID: “LU|d6:3..10|” means in the pool, the first will be LU000003 and last will be LU000010 for a maximum of 8 sessions in the pool.
• When session logging is active, the userID is included when logging a session start.
• VT220 / ASCII printing fixes for better formatting and cleaner pagination.
• Very large buffers of VT/ASCII output containing thousands of lines of output were not processed correctly. This version now supports numerous 16K buffers streamed to the server from the host as part of a “dump” of data that users are accustomed to copying from the scroll area to Notepad or other text editing applications in prior desktop terminal emulators.
• TLS Handshake errors are now logged to the Event log as well as reported more clearly to users
• XTERM environment settings parsed to avoid display on screen (none of these relate to the web environment or are needed by customers at this time). The Windows SSH Server support is XTERM based so this improves support for accessing a Windows system with SSH.
• Fixed a bug in the allocation of a terminal scrolling buffer or print buffer size (scroll buffer size can be configured using user interfaces, while print buffer size is in the registry with a default of 8192). If multiple hosts are configured with different print / scroll buffer sizes, if a session is first used to connect to a host with a smaller buffer size than another host, if that session is then re-used with the host that has a larger buffer size, once the number of scroll/print lines exceed the allocated buffer, an exception occurs.  This will not “crash” the service but will result in a dump and loss of the scroll/print data involved (also probably impacting the user’s session stability).  Fixed in this release.
• Pooled sessions in Clustered servers were not managed from active->available under certain conditions such as being manually closed in the Administrator Console.
• Some Telnet errors when Writing standard or RPQ buffers were missing the Session ID when logged to the Event Log.
• SSH Connection failures now logged to event log including details
• SSH Configuration file is now checked for updates so that changes don’t require a service restart
• Since April of 2023 the TLS default configuration file had “auto” for server certificate checking…this led to failed connections mostly experienced by first-time installers. This has been changed to “none” so that the TLS server certificate isn’t verified beyond providing encryption.  Many mainframes and IBMi hosts use TLS certificates that are expired or self-signed, leading to failed checks!
• Clustered servers user counts were not being tallied correctly if a server was on hold

Profiles Mode Configuration – config/Admin.html Page

• Added new documentation for OpenID Security when configuring with Azure Entra (previously Azure AD). This includes how to configure API rights using the Azure Console so that the Graph API works.
• Added setting for the client Cookies expiration days. This allows customers that want to keep sessions open overnight for users that have closed their browser (and sessions are configured to stay active until closed explicitly by users).
• Added control of Telnet Keep Alive Minutes for non-SSH Telnet sessions
• Added Minimum Font Width and Minimum Font Height which is key to new enhancement in the FVTerm Web Terminal Emulator to introduce scroll bars if a emulator window is sized so that the font can become unreadable otherwise.
• Added Control for Numeric Only Field locking in 5250 sessions. Some emulators do not prevent non-numeric characters in 5250 “numeric only” fields, and as a result many applications need this setting as users and developers have become accustomed to non-numeric characters allowed, such a forward slashes in a date field.
• Added Print Page size for device printing
• When AzureAD is the selected security type, the “Get Thumbprints from Manifest” action will now display the dates for expiration of each thumbprint to foster easier management of when certificates will be expiring.

Inventu Viewer Diagnostics Dashboard

• Diagnostic Dashboard is now only available for customers with active Maintenance and Support or Subscription. The Diagnostic Dashboard will be continuously updated as a key component of Inventu Support.  Future versions will include access to integrated AI chat with indexed support documentation and issue resolution cases.
• WebSocket analysis functionality tweaked to support additional attributes and factors
• Added new action for SSH connect failures
• Added new action for IIS HTTPS Certificate pending expiration
• Improved support for obtaining FVTerm status when HTTPS is only supported protocol