Musac.

[Craig Knights]

OK, yes we are still using Musac Classic.  We're finally going to change to Kamar later this year, it's been understandably difficult for our MUSAC guy to give it up.

But until that happens, this is the problem we have.

Last year in June our long suffering main Windows file server gave up.  Now we had been expecting this and had migrated our domain controllers to much more modern hardware.  We also got a nice Netgear ReadyNAS 512 to serve up files.  Great, goes much faster, RAID 6, 8TB.  Nice backups etc..  Runs Linux.

I put the MUSAC share, the M: drive on there, great, fast, nice.  OK.  Worked just fine from June until this year, a real performance boost.  So for the last month, all Windows machines on gigabit wired LAN connections and our terminal server (most staff run MacBooks so they use this heavily) get Musac data access errors.  The terminal server usually needs a reboot each morning to get Musac to run properly again..  The databases themselves are not corrupting.  iPerf shows that I can happily pull 930Mb/s all day from the NAS.  Something seems to have changed.

So was putting Musac on the NAS a big mistake?  Reading Musac's website suggest it is.  They say Windows all the way and no SMB3.

My current plan is to move the Musac share off the NAS onto the terminal server's disk, so it can run locally for those users.  The users that run it on their machines, (maybe 5 of us) will have to have to run it from a share on the terminal server.

Anybody like to weigh in with opinions?

Craig

[Keith Craig]

Craig,

We moved to KAMAR many years ago because of the Mac support but have kept Musac for managing our enrolment process (we used to run 2 Musac databases). A couple of years ago we were told that MUSAC would not run from a Mapped Drive on our Novell OES linux server and had to run from a Windows server. I put it onto the server hosting our accounting system. I have found that Windows server handles file locking etc differently to SMB on Linux.

Regards

Keith

Keith Craig BCom PGDipBus(IS) CNE
Systems Administrator 

Phone +64 9 5231060 x843 Mobile +64 (0) 21541549

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[Andrew Godfrey]

+1 for looking at file locking. There were a few Novell Netware server tweaks that we used to use but since we are now with Kamar I have not needed to make any Novell Linux or Samba tweaks.

Not sure whether your ReadyNAS OS will allow you to make samba tweaks either.

Here is some old but relevant reading on the matter.

http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/samba/book/ch05_05.html

_______________________________________

 

Andrew Godfrey  |  Network Manager  |  Burnside High School  |  Christchurch | New Zealand

[Alistair Baird]

I sorted a school with Musac as a remote app (needs terminal server) and it runs heaps faster than just trying to run Musac across the Gigabit LAN. The Windows Terminal Server accesses the Musac samba share off a (SmartNet) Linux DC. Staff were trying to run Musac across the wireless, and it corrupted databases daily. Since putting in the TS, no more problems.

I would say the NAS box is not optimised for the many users, so would be putting it back on the main server

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St Peters College 

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[Patrick Dunford]

Don’t expect Samba to ever be as good as Windows, when I used Samba it was roughly equivalent to an old version of Windows server.

 

Samba is a compatibility layer on top of Linux, and has to translate the underlying Linux DOS way of doing things to a Windows equivalent. You can’t expect they will behave the same. It may be a little better now that they have access to MS’s source code than when they were reverse engineering the protocols.

 

Probably the best way of looking at it from Musac perspective is they only support Windows, if you want to do Samba it will be  unsupported.

From: Craig Knights

Sent: Tuesday, March 3, 2015 9:59 AM

To: techies-f...@googlegroups.com

Subject: [techies-for-schools] Musac.

 

[Patrick Dunford]

The corruption will come from people running the Musac client and it drops the connection over wireless or something, it is just not designed and Musac will fallback on some recommendation that it should be used on a wired network.

 

You don’t get that over terminal services since the session never leaves the terminal server.

 

But also one of our sites went to Kamar and no more problems either, Kamar (Filemaker Pro) is a lot more bulletproof, a proper client server architecture designed from the ground up. Running Musac clients with Microsoft Access is a bit like running your server on Windows 98. it works but will never be as good as something that is designed from the ground up for enterprise use.

[Craig Knights]

Yes we are very familiar with the issues around wifi and Musac, it's not that we're seeing corruption of the databases, just a loss of connection long enough to upset the clients.  We've been running it on the terminal server for many years.  It's just weird that it's happening on both wired and terminal server sessions.

Looks like we'll go with hosting it on the TS, but not until after interim reports are done.

I'm going to have a play with setting that up on a virtual machine to try and find all the wrinkles in that plan.

PCSchool have chimed in with "what about us?", so we'll investigate that too.

thanks to all,

Craig

[Julian Davison]

It’s interesting to see how often a TS deployment of MUSAC eases user and admin lives. Removing the file-access component of the equation (where you need to worry about things like SMB3) seems to bring significant improvements in performance. Aside from the licencing costs/issues it brings MUSAC into a more mobile world quite effectively as well.

 

PCSchool are interesting. They don’t have a huge share of the NZ SMS market, as I understand it, but most of the schools that have gone that way are quite loyal to them. The support tends to be quite responsive too.

In contrast to Kamar it’s historically been a more flexible option, but as usual full exploitation of the flexibility involves an investment of time to do it right.

 

J,

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[eaton...@gmail.com]

We original put in a terminal server VM just for our Mac clients (as a published app), but soon changed everyone over to using it rather than the win32 client app.

A couple of wee hiccups were PaperCut for printing (which meant that we had to run as a desktop and not a published app) and users closing the RDP window and not logging out of MUSAC.
This helps on one hand for intermittent connection issues, but was a bit of a pain for backups: to get a consistent backup you really need everyone off MUSAC. Forcibly kicking them off can cause corruption to the MDB as well.

From a sysadmin perspective, the most frustrating thing is getting updates required for ministry connectivity released on Thursday/Friday to meet a ministry deadline on Monday... Has happened several times in the last 2 years.

We are going to have to move off MUSAC Classic based simply on the amount of extra complication (and hence fragility) of having an extra Server VM running, firewall NAT rules, caching of DNS issues etc. For a primary school this is really far too many points where something can go wrong without an onsite ICT person.

Pete

Tuesday, 3 March 2015 11:45 am +1300 from Craig Knights <craig....@gmail.com>:

[trevor storr]

We have MUSAC classic running on an OES11 box as a NSS share with no unusual file system problems.  The share is on disks on the same physical server and not connected over the network though.  The only problems we get are ones pointed out earlier - disconnecting the client disgracefully when moving / shutting down wireless.  File locking is certainly worth looking at.

cheers

Trevor

Trevor Storr
Director of eLearning, CantaNET http://educo.vln.school.nz
Waimate High School
Waimate
New Zealand

[Patrick Dunford]

One of our schools jumped to Kamar. Another is considering but have also been offered Edge.

 

I’m interested how many Musac customers have considered Edge or would rather jump across to something else like Kamar.

[Craig Knights]

My boss had a good look at Edge and was not impressed.  Said it looked like it might be ready in 5 or 6 years.

Craig

[J B]

Out of the three schools I worked with that had Musac all looked at Edge, all walked away very unimpressed and all went etap instead.

Musac classic is unstable junk based on a large messy pile of access databases.  We to went the terminal services route with remote app which allowed teachers to access ot from anywhere with internet access.  This did not stop all corruption issues though.

Our primary concern was with the still present musac attitude, they don't care, their 'client' is the MoE and they could not care less about schools.  That is why you could spend an hour on the phone for no solution or send emails that were never answered.

By contrast every other vendor I have dealt with is amazing.

Jeffrey.

Sent from my Windows Phone

---

From: Patrick Dunford
Sent: ‎3/‎03/‎2015 9:11 p.m.
To: techies-f...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Re[2]: [techies-for-schools] Musac.

[Patrick Dunford]

That’s really sad to hear. I saw a demo of it 5 years ago probably, I can’t believe it’s going so slowly.

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[Julian Davison]

That’s interesting. I’ve heard of two local schools that are planning full transition to Edge this year – from having looked just prior to the end of year break last year…

 

J,

[Craig Knights]

To be fair, I should go check with my boss and see when it was that he saw it..

ta

Craig

[Keith Craig]

One thing to consider when looking changing your SMS is what server and client platforms is it supported on? Before we moved to KAMAR all our students used Mac’s but staff all used Windows laptops because of Musac. 

Also talk to schools around you about their experience with different vendors. Support is a big issue. We don’t call them very often but when we do we want a quick response. We also want to talk to someone who will not reject our request if we are trying to do something a little bit different.

Keith Craig BCom PGDipBus(IS) CNE
Systems Administrator 

Phone +64 9 5231060 x843 Mobile +64 (0) 21541549

From: Craig Knights <craig....@gmail.com>
Reply-To: "techies-f...@googlegroups.com" <techies-f...@googlegroups.com>

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[Bevan McNaughton]

Just some input to our setup here for comparison:

We use MUSAC primarily due to the more dynamic offering it has with timetabling compared to KAMAR. We did investigate KAMAR last year as an option but I believe that this was the factor that lead us to stay put.

Although we have looked at MUSAC Edge, many staff are using the MUSAC Classic Web Portal without issues (i.e. from Mac). Using MUSAC with our LMS has always been tricky it seems - it works great when everything is behaving, but some small glitches cause real headaches... 

After looking at MUSAC Edge last year as well there was some way to go in functionality for us to move fully to it. I know of some schools who use a 2-part approach, with Edge for most stuff and Classic for others, at this time I'd have to follow up with what parts are used locally and in the cloud however.

Our MUSAC server is also a TS/RDP server for staff doing reports from the likes of home or even via Mac (since some features of Web Classic are limited) and it works adequately.

The biggest issue we face is staff who inadvertently stay logged into their PC's overnight with MUSAC open resulting in database and maintenance issues. Lockouts of their accounts as a reminder soon fix it however (for a while).

Regards,

Bevan

Bevan McNaughton

Intranet Manager

Southland Girls' High School

328 Tweed Street

Invercargill 9812

Phone: +64 3 211 6030

Fax: +64 3 216 9010

[Craig Knights]

All very useful information, thanks..

I'm sort of a little shy about admitting mistakes on here but here's today's one. 

Made a virtual machine copy of our TS/RDP server yesterday to experiment with..  I had a thought it might not be a good idea with the domain...  But I thought changing it's name would sort that..  Of course it didnt and it broke the domain trust for the real RDP server..  Logged in locally, took it off the domain, put it back on, phew..  

<feeling a little silly..>

Craig

[Chris O'Donoghue]

Hi All,

Just to let you know I'm the CTO of Musac, I've been here since September 2014 and I think our cloud solution is making great strides towards being suitable for all schools.

Jeffery (synack) I dispute your assertion that we think the MoE is our customer and we don't care about schools. We are passionate about our customers, the schools and teachers that lead teaching and learning for all our children. 

I understand the technology solution that Musac classic is based on has legacy issues, and yes a flakey network environments is one of the scenarios that access does not handle that well. We are still committed to advancing and supporting our classic customers while they find the rich feature set useful or essential to the operation of their schools.

Edge (our cloud solution) is suitable for a wide range of schools, and features, usability and responsiveness are improving with every deployment.

We currently are deploying about twice weekly and our longer term plan is to improve this even more.

Kind regards

Chris

On Tuesday, 3 March 2015 21:25:05 UTC+13, synack wrote:

Out of the three schools I worked with that had Musac all looked at Edge, all walked away very unimpressed and all went etap instead.

Musac classic is unstable junk based on a large messy pile of access databases.  We to went the terminal services route with remote app which allowed teachers to access ot from anywhere with internet access.  This did not stop all corruption issues though.

Our primary concern was with the still present musac attitude, they don't care, their 'client' is the MoE and they could not care less about schools.  That is why you could spend an hour on the phone for no solution or send emails that were never answered.

By contrast every other vendor I have dealt with is amazing.

Jeffrey.

Sent from my Windows Phone

---

From: Patrick Dunford
Sent: ‎3/‎03/‎2015 9:11 p.m.
To: techies-f...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Re[2]: [techies-for-schools] Musac.

One of our schools jumped to Kamar. Another is considering but have also been offered Edge.

 

I’m interested how many Musac customers have considered Edge or would rather jump across to something else like Kamar.

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[Julian Davison]

For completeness I should mention that the schools I was referring to are High Schools – I’m under the impression that the features commonly required at primary level are already well catered for in MUSAC Edge.

 

I’ve also had generally good support from MUSAC.

Kamar’s knowledge base has generally answered questions I have on it.

PCSchool support has always been both responsive to issues and supportive of additions to cater for the sometimes slightly esoteric requirements of an individual site.

 

J,

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[J B]

Hi Chris, Just to let you know this is the first time I have ever been able to speak to someone with real authority at Musac despite asking numerous times.

It is good to hear that Edge is making great strides, it needed to as after - what is it now - 5 to 10 years of development - it needed to.  When we looked at it, it was a basically non customizable solution that could not do stuff like print a list of oldest and only children.  The presenter was also more interested in arguing that we should not have a graph the way we wanted it than taking feedback.  The testing standards were limited and did not include all that were used either. 

After discussion, features or things we needed could be added if enough - lots and lots - of schools wanted it at your leisure.  It is also limited to work with only certain browsers if you want everything to work.

I am glad you recognise that classic has its faults, I am troubled though you still try to put more of the onus on schools with your assertions like it is network instability or something the schools are doing that makes classic flakey.  Microsoft themselves - the people who made access - told everyone 15 years ago that access was for testing only.  It was for single user non-network use as it had real problems that they were not willing to solve as they had a product for that already called SQL.  You and your company insist on blaming the schools foe bad networks or whatever excuse you can come up with to try and get around this fact.  The code changes even show you know this is the problem as the absences stability fixes just streamed data into a text file before hitting another smaller database to limit the damage  when it inevitably dies.  There is the Jet database tool which does compact and despairs on the databases but this can nuke data as well.

I also was not fond of the lies the helpdesk told, the little ones like 'no no one else has that problem', 'no, thats uncommon' which really ring untrue when you go down the road to a completely different school and hear on the intercom that Musac is down again with the same issue.

By comparison our new providers can have a problem solved in 10minutes from an email as opposed to 40 minutes of 'unusual' delay before being fobbed off with something to try if it was not a known problem.

I'm sure edge can work well for some schools but it was no where near being able to handle the reporting that all three schools did without loosing many features and datasets.

It is good, finally after all this time - dealing with Musac - to be able to provide feedback to someone who may have a shot at changing the culture of the place. Good luck.

Sent from my Windows Phone

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From: Chris O'Donoghue
Sent: ‎4/‎03/‎2015 11:31 a.m.

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[Patrick Dunford]

Classic is being phaed out soon, that’s why schools are making decisions.

To:mailto:techies-f...@googlegroups.com

[Chris O'Donoghue]

Hi Patrick,

There has been no decision to phase out classic. It suits a significant number of schools and while it suits their needs we will continue to support and develop it.

Chris

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Mobile: +64 (21) 892 707

[Chris O'Donoghue]

Hi all,

I apologise if I implicated that the instability in access/jet was somehow the school's fault. While it is a reality with the technology that classic is based on, the network instability is in no way the fault of schools. There are a number of ways that these issues can be minimised and OPs have referred to them here repeatedly.

I'll refer your comments regarding support on to the Customer Support Manager.

I won't get into a historic discussion of technology, or culture. Be assured we are constantly trying to improve the experience for our customers, whether via our products or our helpdesk.

Kind Regards

Chris

[Patrick Dunford]

Well, I guess schools are making their own decisions then, based on their perception of the longevity of the Classic product, or the instability referred to.

 

If I had my say I would advise rebranding and ditching the Musac name altogether.

[Craig Knights]

After a frustrating day for the staff,  last period we locked them out of musac and pulled the data from the nas to the local disk of the ts and shared it out to those not using ts. So far so good....  we'll see what tomorrow brings. .

Thanks to all.
Craig

[Rob Wood]

Twice weekly version changes - hmm. This man's obviously been trained by Rory Butler. Nothing changes :-)

[Chris O'Donoghue]

:) Indeed,

As I'm sure you are joking here, I'll just react to the extent that: modern cloud based development is based on a continuous deployment model, while we are not at that stage yet (or in the near future) we are constantly working to release code when it is ready, to our cloud service, edge.

I've never met Rory, so I couldn't comment.

Kind regards

Chris

[Raewyn Nicholson]

Hey guys - I love Musac Classic.  TTS have it running perfectly at our school, yes there are some issues when people don't log out of the sidebar and you need to update the system - easy fix around though.  Absences crashes now and then (wireless) but not that often.  Have always found MUSAC support fantastic - yes they do need to comply with MOE policy as do all vendors.  Love the fact though I can create and play and customise without having to bring another party in to pay for the privilege.  We have been told that Classic will no longer be supported from 2017 - we will be looking at all vendors out there including MUSAC Edge.  

Raewyn Nicholson

Administrator

09 627 9940

[Gillian Ellison]

Ditto for our school.

We need to be able to fully customise and have learned to do this ourselves.

Yes it's a bit slow on access the database but we have found it reliable.

Great help desk, have always been able to help us with our queries.

Gill Ellison

0210531505

[Chris O'Donoghue]

Hi Raewyn,

Musac has made no decision to cease support and development for Musac Classic. Rest assured, that if you think that Musac Classic is best for your school we'll be there to support you.

Kind Regards

Chris

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[Patrick Dunford]

I read a blog post which said we will support Classic until a date in 2017

 

From: Chris O'Donoghue

Sent: Friday, March 6, 2015 9:54 AM

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[Chris O'Donoghue]

Hi Patrick,

Yes a blog post about this time last year, which said we will support Musac Classic until "at least" 31/1/2017

In the same post it said "We will not force our loyal customers to make decisions until they are ready."

No decision has been made to end date Musac Classic. 

The 2017 date is not seen by anyone here as an end date, more of a commitment that we will not be dropping our classic product.

Kind regards

Chris