Multiple Casper Admins users logged in at once

[p_duzzz]

Does anybody have experience with having multiple users on Casper Admin and committing changes simultaneously? Is restarting the application the only way to refresh the repository?

[wilesd]

Yeah I'm in a similar situation - A couple of admins working in different offices which seems to cause corruption when both committing changes?

[powellbc]

Count me in as wanting information on this.

[jarednichols]

Yeah this is bad mojo. You'll see problems if this is happening.

My hunch is one of the following, both having to do with table locking:
1. Casper Admin locks tables when you log in. Changes are then committed when someone does a Save. The problem comes in whereby (I assume) Casper Admin doesn't do a check to see if the tables in question are already locked.
2. Possibly more likely due to symptoms is that Casper Admin isn't doing table locking at all. So, you've got multiple people doing commits on tables that aren't meant for simultaneous changes, causing odd issues.

So, I suppose the FR should be that Casper Admin checks for table locks before diving in full stop.

The "easy" way around multiple Casper Admin instances would be to shift to a storage engine which by default does row-level locking (e.g. InnoDB) , however I assume that would take some re-tweaking of the entire product.

[rockpapergoat]

even better may be to move to a pub-sub model with a message broker in the middle, like 0mq or similar. queuing up the changes would ensure eventual consistency and avoid trying to write simultaneously to the same tables. just a thought…

it's always felt to me like the core of the jamf suite was designed ad hoc without much thought to future expansion. for most people who have nothing to provide casper's functionality, it's just the ticket.

[donmontalvo]

Interesting thread, as we are in the middle of a global expansion.

Can JAMF chime in on this one?

Don

[mm2270]

I would agree that the core apps in the Casper Suite were seemingly designed with a "single" admin in mind, and not large organizations with multiple players. JAMF is working toward making it more workable in those scenarios, but its a slow process, and I get the feeling it will take a ground up rewrite of much of the Casper Suite's functions to really bring it up to that level.

I'm also in a situation where I am just one of several people potentially working in Casper Admin (and the JSS) making and saving changes. I often wondered what would happen if we were all saving changes to the same areas simultaneously

[mdonovan]

This is quite an old thread but with a still relevant question.

Can anyone share an update on this, as we appear to have run afoul of this recently with content in nested configurations disappearing.

Thanks

[FritzsCorner]

@mdonovan I asked this question at JNUC a couple weeks ago and the response is still the same as it has been. Have one shared computer that runs Casper Admin or have one dedicated Casper Administrator.

They said they are aware of the demand for a better solution but didn't have a timeline on when we could expect anything.

[calumhunter]

is there a feature request for this?

[RobertHammen]

https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/featureRequest.html?id=704

[mdonovan]

@FritzsCorner - thanks for the update.

@RobertHammen - that's the closest I found, but a notification is still slightly off the mark from what is really required.

[RobertHammen]

Agreed.

I'm not sure what the future holds for Casper Admin - in some respects, using it as a method to get stuff into the JSS is a pain and I'd prefer to just dump things into the Packages folder. On the other hand, drag-and-drop to get items into a configuration is much easier than a web portal.

Unsure if we'll see a new version or a change in the way Casper does the workflow, but either is welcomed.

[stevevalle]

I would love for JAMF to do something about this. We have multiple staff with admin access to Casper and there have been times we we have all been logged on at once uploading and making changes.

Casper Admin really needs to be able to handle multiple logins at once!

[ToriAnneke]

+1

I suspect and hope that Casper 10 will address this.