Problems with appinventor 2 in domain environments

[jcarr...@gmail.com]

Hello,


I work for a technical school district, and we provide technical education for 11th and 12th graders from several surrounding schools. Some of our classes are offered in those other school districts.

We have a IT class located at one of those offsite schools and the instructor requested to have appinventor 2 installed on the computers in her class. I followed the instructions for uninstalling appinventor 1, did the reboot, and installed appinventor 2 under the admin account provided to me by their school district. The next day the instructor emails me and said she created a simple program and attempted to send the program to the emulator. The emulator launched and and proceeded to loop "waiting for emulator" 5....4...3..2...1, 5...4....3....2...1 and never sent the test program to the emulator. We tried some of the suggested troubleshooting for this issue and it did not work.

While researching this issue I got the idea to reinstall appinventor 2 under the local admin account for the PC. We provide the PC's and support for this class and their district supplies the network, and the group policy for the PC's on their network. Installing appinventor 2 under the local account had worse effects then installing it under the admin account I have. At least installing it under the admin account allowed it to work, but it only worked under the installed account (mine) and no other account. The local admin install didn't work for anyone.

Finally I did a test. I have a backdoor to one of their servers that runs active directory, and I added myself to the Administrators group, and then after that I tried a student account and appinventor 2 worked. I realize that appinventor 2 requires it to be installed under an admin account (which I am, albeit low level admin...not my district), but just how high of admin rights do I need??? There appears to be an issue with this method to me. Problem number one is that it is not good security for this district to give me full admin rights on their domain, and even if I can get their admins to install it what happens if that admin ever leaves the district? Standard procedure says to deactivate that persons AD account. Doing so will break appinventor 2 I know because I did something similar.

After I tested a student account successfully with my admin account a memberOF Administrators I went back and removed myself from that group and it was broke again for the student account when I tested. The only solution I can think of for these type of situations is to create a service account in AD to install this application....seems a bit ridiculous. What do you think?


Jeff

[Andrew McKinney]

Hi Jeff,

Thank you for your detailed story and efforts taken to solve your issues, albeit not optimal. I will investigate your situation and see how we can do a better job. As you can imagine there are lots of different ways schools setup and restrict access to student and administrators accounts. Finding the one install fits all is tricky on Windows.

Again thank you for this information it will help us make a better installer for all.

Andrew McKinney

Technical Lead, MIT App Inventor Project

[jcarr...@gmail.com]

Thank you for your reply Mr. McKinney.

We (the instructor and their district support staff) have a meeting next week to see how we can get this working. I have a pretty good relationship with their staff so I'm confident we will get around this.

It was just a bit strange that we didn't have this issue at all with appinventor 1. When I created their image 2yrs back that program worked just fine. It wasn't until installing appinventor 2 that we saw this issue. I'm going to forward your response to the instructor because she currently has a few posts on this forum too. She got a response from Shay that says to check the permissions however, while I know she is right about that, it is not the solution for us given that adding myself to the administrators group made it work for all. There seems to be a persistent check of the installers account when the emulator runs. As I said previously had I been able to just add myslelf to that group, install appinventor, and remove myself from that group we would be fine. Unfortunately as soon as I remove myself it broke again. Technically I've probably already done something shady and/or illegal by adding myself to a group that I should not be a member of. With that said I'm letting them handle it because I like my job, and I want to be on the up-and-up with them.

Thanks again

Jeff

[csmr...@gmail.com]

Hello Andrew and Jeff from Trevor across the pond in London,

Experiencing the same problem at my school in that, the IT support have installed App Inventor TODAY 5th March 2015 and it fully works for them as an Administrator with fully access rights;
when they log off and I as a teacher log on to the same networked Windows 7 PC and I try my App screen and blocks are present, Emulator starts but does not run companion with aistarter just looping, even after 30 minutes.

This seems to be a common problem for several schools that are tring to install App Inventor 2, but not all.

I will be running teacher training in App Inventor 2 in 10 days time and have arranged to have it installed at King's College, University of London, where it seems staff and students have more access rights.

Can I get some guidance to give to school IT technicians to enable them to install App Inventor 2 across their networks for students to use Emulators?

Thanks,

Trevor