Many of our users would like to have an instance of Live (v11) and Beta (v12.5) opened simultaneously on their desktops so that they can do comparisons while testing. Currently we manage this by modifying the hostname in the local beta ini file. However the number of users wanting this is growing fast and after restores we have to recreate the hostnames in the TX_Machine_Location table in Beta. Is there a way to pass a variable in the ini to cut down on this process of modifying the local ini file. Or does anyone have another suggestion for allowing multiple instances of Tessitura?
Thanks
Scott
I'm not sure if you're going to find a different approach, but you might think about ways to automate what you're already doing.
You could certainly write some SQL to add new rows to TX_MACHINE_LOCATION formulaically, for example if you determine that you'll give everyone an alternate hostname in the format <existing_hostname>_T, you'd do something like INSERT INTO TX_MACHINE_LOCATION (machine_name) SELECT machine_name + '_T' AS machine_name FROM TX_MACHINE_LOCATION. (Hopefully you get the picture -- that would only work if machine_no is an identity, which I'm not sure it is--and if none of your hostnames are 15 characters or greater.) Be aware when doing this kind of thing that even though the machine_name column is 30 characters long, most create_loc columns are 16 characters, so if a hostname goes over, you'll get errors from the client when adding rows in certain places.
For the other side of the equation, it depends on how much control you have over user machines. If you don't care about preserving existing ini file settings for the test instance, you could just regenerate those test INI files in a way that calculates and inserts the required hostname= parameter -- I actually do something very similar to this when provisioning new users for remote desktop services. (A script runs on first login that just generates the ini files for the user according to a determined hostname scheme.) If you don't have that level of access, you might try having the users themselves make the necessary change to their test INI files according to some documentation or maybe a how-to video.