Problems with Copy/Paste from Excel into C-Cure

When you copy a cell in Excel, end of line characters (CRLF) are included at the end of the data. Beware if you paste into C-Cure or other applications.

A customer had about 100 entries to add to an enumerated list. The entries were in a spreadsheet so he did a copy from Excel and paste into the Personnel\Configuration screen for the enumerated field. Then he created a template and attempted to import data into the field.

All records were rejected saying the enumerated values were unknown. When we manually selected a value from the pull-down, then exported the records, we say a line break. Unfortunately, it took a few hours of investigation before this was tried.

By editing the value on the configuration screen, we saw that you could hit delete then re-add the last character and the invisible characters at the end were removed and the import worked.

I have seem similar things happen when copying and pasting in Sql Server grids. Beware.

Virtual Machines

A Virtual Machine (VM) is an emulated computer, running on a physical machine. You take a few gigabytes of disk space, several hundred megabytes of memory, and install the operating system. Since the VM consists of several large files, it is easy to backup, restore, and copy.

Microsoft and EMC are leading providers of commercial software in this area (other non-commercial software is also available. Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 is free, and is allows you to create a VM on your computer onto which you can install a copy of the C-Cure 800 server for development and testing. EMC offers a free VMware Player which can run a VM created by the commercial VMware product or Microsoft Virtual PC.

Both vendors have higher-end offerings that allow the VM to be run in a production environment, and provide management and control tools. EMC is the industry leader with an extensive VMware Server product line. By running your security system on a VM, you can use server hardware more efficiently, and gain reliability and flexibility. Many companies have already moved to a VM environment for their database and webserver.

Hints/suggestions

• To get started, download Virtual PC 2004 from the above link. A PC with a P4 processor, 10GB free disk space, and 1GB of should be sufficient to load a VM.
• When you create the VM, you need to size the disk and memory. I usually assign 3-5 GB of space and 256B of memory. Adjust this depending on what will be loaded on the VM.
• After creating the VM, you must load an operating system. For Windows, an old copy of Windows 2000 is good because it does not require activation. For XP, you will need to activate you copy after the trial period. Linux and other OS's are also supported.
• C-Cure uses a USB dongle for licensing. Software House can provide a temporary "zero sentinel" license to Integrators that does not require the dongle.
• Digi offers products which allow a USB device to be connected to a hub on network (you need to verify compatibility).
  

Welcome

I have created this blog as a communications forum within the physical security community. While I am most familiar with Software House C-Cure and S2 NetBox products, I encourage users and integrators of other products to join us.

-Jeff Bennett