Your servers Down Sunday Morning?

[craig_read 43]

Let's be careful here, let's not start quoting ITIL back at the developers.  I think a 24 to 48 hour SLA in this case is probably quite sufficient considering the size of deployment and level of criticality of it (or lack there of).  This is a camera application it's not a business critical application so we must not apply the same rules.

To be honest all there needs to be is something that detects a connection problem, disables ChasePlane, and returns the sim to a state where it can work normally without it until the issue is resolved; making chaseplane temporarily unavailable but the sim not.  To me the issue isn't the availability of ChasePlane, it's the fact it impacts the availability of the sim without hacking exe.xml files etc and camera config files.. something not everyone understands..

 

[Woozie 732]

Craig, it doesnt matter if its a business critical application or not.

Its simple: If you force your customer to be permanently online for anything other than functional reasons, and you cant ensure permanent availability.....then dont do it, for Gods sake!

And 48h SLA for licensing server issues? Wow

 

And i despise ITIL btw.....:P 

[rdtv91 73]

Correct, if a company requires a link to their server then they should have redundancy, it isn't the end users problem.

[gypsyczar 20]

No, Chaseplane needs a fail safe mode.

One of my pet peeves is a copy protection scheme that punishes the legitimate user, if that is the case here.  Granted, this is not mission critical software, but just going back to the base P3D or FSX view system is not what I paid for.  In fact, a good portion of my time has been spent setting up views and achieving continuity of the view system across aircraft. I DON't/CAN'T go back to the stock view system.  There needs to be a fail safe mode so I can have productive enjoyment of the software I purchased even if there is a server/internet outage.

Just to be clear, I am NOT ranting against the CP devs.  In fact i believe that they have a fantastic product with exceptional support.  There just needs to be an absoluete priority for a  fix ASAP so that this will not happen again

[craig_read 43]

A company should provide an SLA yes, and in doing so will consider the level of criticality of the impact of failure.. then the SLA provided will be proportional (or they're simply burning money).  Even large scale telcos (who I deal with regularly btw) have varying SLAs depending on criticality to business and product purchased.  I think 48 hours to fix something that is non-critical is perfectly fine.  As a consequence of ChasePlane being unavailable for 48 hours, no businesses income is damaged and no one put at personal risk, the actual consequence here is 'mild inconvenience' which yes, most companies large or small won't issue short SLA's for because its incredible uneconomical to do so.  Your remark leads me to assume you have very little to do with the financial side of products and services but mainly the technical..

I understand the frustration but to me the issue here is availability of other things (namely the sim) are affected as a consequence of ChasePlane being unavailable i.e. P3D settings are changed by ChasePlane in order for it to function and consequently when it doesn't work properly, P3D appears "broken" to a number of users.  This can be got around with configuration changes, but this should be done by the ChasePlane software and not the user (many don't know how to do it).  I would propose this could be handled by the following logic built into the software at the next release..

ChasePlane detects the issue, prompts the user to close the sim, resets the configuration to the default state, then issues the dialogue

"ChasePlane is unavailable right now, your simulator is now back in it's default state, we'll send you a message once the issue is resolved."

Once ChasePlane detects the connection again, prompt the user to revert to using ChasePlane.

That should get around it and for the majority of people be perfectly fine.. 

 

[craig_read 43]

5 minutes ago, gypsyczar said:

No, Chaseplane needs a fail safe mode.

One of my pet peeves is a copy protection scheme that punishes the legitimate user, if that is the case here.  Granted, this is not mission critical software, but just going back to the base P3D or FSX view system is not what I paid for.  In fact, a good portion of my time has been spent setting up views and achieving continuity of the view system across aircraft. I DON't/CAN'T go back to the stock view system.  There needs to be a fail safe mode so I can have productive enjoyment of the software I purchased even if there is a server/internet outage.

Just to be clear, I am NOT ranting against the CP devs.  In fact i believe that they have a fantastic product with exceptional support.  There just needs to be an absoluete priority for a  fix ASAP so that this will not happen again

It's my pet peeve too, but it's a result of wide spread piracy... Without piracy we'd have no need for DRM, or serial numbers.. or any of this.. but people still pirate all the time, even when the software is inexpensive.. and this frustrates everyone.

[Flyinggok 55]

same here :(

[phatcat213 1]

Same problem here. I am not that savvy anyway when it comes to these things. It seemed a lot easier to set up than EZDok and now this. So what? reset to default and wait for a solution?

[samwheeler 1]

Just now, phatcat213 said:

Same problem here. I am not that savvy anyway when it comes to these things. It seemed a lot easier to set up than EZDok and now this. So what? reset to default and wait for a solution?

Yep, Kevin is an awesome guy and I am sure that he will have it working again soon but for now we need to just wait and see..

 

[Woozie 732]

6 minutes ago, craig_read said:

Your remark leads me to assume you have very little to do with the financial side of products and services but mainly the technical..

Yeah we never talk about finances in project management.... ^^

[craig_read 43]

Just now, phatcat213 said:

Same problem here. I am not that savvy anyway when it comes to these things. It seemed a lot easier to set up than EZDok and now this. So what? reset to default and wait for a solution?

Exactly, and I mean this genuinely.. but users such as yourself are the ones this affects the most.. To be honest.. if I were you I'd probably wait for resolution before messing with exe.xml files etc.. It's not hard to do but if you're really not sure it's best to wait for some 'official instructions' or till the problem is resolved.. again.. refer to my previous post.. Logic such as that would have mitigated this for you temporarily while they apply a fix.

[gypsyczar 20]

Once again,

There should be no reason that CP should not be able to function in a somewhat degraded mode without an internet or server connection.  Store whatever you need locally for fallback and then update for normal operation if a connection is available.  Simple system design for redundancy.  With all due respect, if this outage is copy protection related, the product should have a fallback high availability server for the copy protection scheme as cost of doing business.  

I do not buy copy protection, I buy productive use of software.

[craig_read 43]

REMOVED

Comment unwarranted.. apologies..

[craig_read 43]

2 minutes ago, gypsyczar said:

Once again,

There should be no reason that CP should not be able to function in a somewhat degraded mode without an internet or server connection.  Store whatever you need locally for fallback and then update for normal operation if a connection is available.  Simple system design for redundancy.  With all due respect, if this outage is copy protection related, the product should have a fallback high availability server for the copy protection scheme as cost of doing business.  

I do not buy copy protection, I buy productive use of software.

It's not necessarily copy protection related!  It's just one reason of many that they may have chosen to do it this way.. it's also convenient for users if settings are stored in the cloud etc.. it adds features..

[Woozie 732]

Just now, craig_read said:

I stand by my previous assumption.

Haha, fair enough

Dont get me wrong, i dont expect them to buy into full scale redundancy, but this seem to be missing even a basic level of reliability. 

Even with a 24 SLA for such issues customers would have been informed by now, including ETA....