Concerns - May require redundant networking channel. Requires
administrator or operator availability to support.
Anticipating User Disconnects and Reconnection
Issues - Users must first be warned about the consequences of
disconnection. Agents that provide protection for a disconnected session can
also provide a nuisance for unsuspecting users if they fail to address
protective measures in place for their safety. For example, users must know
how much time they have to reconnect before safeguards take action. If a
remote agent arms itself for application termination, users should be
presented with a large, unmistakable disarming "opt-out" panel that, upon
login and discovery, they can halt any agent actions before termination.
Organizations should carefully discuss and publicize safety measures due to
potential data loss.
Concerns - Users should not be able to disable or specify their own timeouts
due to potential irreversible data loss.
General Design Issues
All active agents should externally log their decisions and actions for post
mortem analysis.
Independent agents should provide their own opt-out, disarming dialogs with
countdown feedback before taking action.
Expect the unexpected - where possible, limit your actions to those areas you
are certain of the outcomes to minimize loss of data and productivity.
Always inspect error codes when reading event logs - the reliability of this
RGS communication method depends upon the Windows Event Log system.
While we have yet to see a failure in this path, we recommend using all
information available to its fullest potential.
Additional Safeguard Features for Windows systems
The following optional procedures for the RGS Sender service can improve the
reliability of your remote agent solution if required in your environment.
RGS Sender Service Recovery Settings
By default, most Windows services are installed without any automatic
restart/recovery settings. This means that when a service terminates,
Windows will, by default, not restart the service unless explicitly set. When
RGS Sender software is first installed, it is installed with Windows defaults (do
not restart).
Restarting the RGS Sender service can support RGS reconnection with a RGS
Receiver client (unless a system error prevents the RGS service from
restarting).
Agent designs should take into account whether or not to check for the
existence of a running RGS Sender service as an indication of a sufficient
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