[Nilknarf]

Good afternoon,

I’m IT support at a few schools, and due to frequent crashing and corrupting of flipcharts on Windows 10 x64, last night I rolled out the very latest version of ActivInspire at one school in the hopes this would help alleviate the issues staff are facing.

Instead, today at 12.40, AI2.8 basically knocked this school’s broadband off for over two hours, a slightly worse issue I think you’ll agree!

This school uses a Sophos UTM as the internet gateway, and when the internet went off, I logged into this and found that the CPU usage was at a solid 100%. When the CPU usage dropped a little for a few seconds every now and then, the internet would return, but then as soon as it hit 100% it would be off again.

After a lot of digging through the logs, I found the cause was a machine on the network requesting “www.activsoftware.co.uk” a few thousand times a second – something that the UTM was killing itself just to try and write to the log files! Once that machine was off the CPU usage dropped, and the UTM could finally serve normal requests again and provide internet access. After investigating the router log files I’ve just found a couple of other machines were doing the same thing as well, although there are many other machines with AI installed that did nothing, so the problem isn’t everywhere.

I’ve now blocked http://www.activsoftware.co.uk via the hosts file to stop machines spamming the router, but this shouldn’t really need to be done. On the bright side nobody complained about ActivInspire crashing this afternoon; they were too busy trying to burn me over the lack of internet access! I’ll be honest though, even if it fixes the crashing I may still drop this version off the network, as there’s obviously something not quite right there.

Do you know if this bug has been reported elsewhere and has a fix in the works?

Also, any suggestions for the crashing of ActivInspire I’m experiencing, beyond using the latest version?

Many thanks for any information you can provide,
Mike.

[Anonymous]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for posting.

Whilst its good to hear that no one has mentioned about the ActivInspire software is crashing, I do agree that this isn’t normal for ActivInspire to stop the internet. 

I would recommend having a look at putting an admin.ini file in place which will stop the ActivInspire from looking for online updates (the ActivSoftware.co.uk). 
https://support.prometheanworld.com/article/?kb=1123
I would recommend changing Key 11 for this.

Hopefully once this is in place it will fix this particular issue.

I hope this information helps, if you still have issues please let me know.

Kind regards,
Adam
Promethean Technical Support

[Anonymous]

Hi Adam,

Perfect, I’ll give that a try today. I’ll update the Admin.ini file in the install package and use GPP to push the updated file out to clients during the day as well. Will this take effect instantly, or will the machines still need a restart for the new settings to take effect?

Many thanks for the quick response,
Mike

[Anonymous]

Hi Mike,

ActivInspire when first launched checks for the profiles that are set and then checks for updates so you should be able to tell the difference straight away without the need for restarting each of the machines.

Hope this helps.

Kind regards,
Adam
Promethean Technical Support

[Anonymous]

Hi Adam,

Just to say that the culprit turned out to be the ActivDriver that was also installed at the same time, not ActivInspire. More specifically the Promethean ActivRelay service that runs in the background.

For those that have had similar issues, disabling this service and the ActivRelayKA startup item under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun stops the large number of requests to that site, and doesn’t affect normal board functions (ActivRelay is a new component to support ‘Classflow’, which we don’t use on our old boards, so we’re not missing anything there).

Many thanks,
Mike.

[Anonymous]

Hi Nilknarf,

Thanks for the update, glad to hear that you found the culprit!

Fingers crossed nothing else stops that internet functionality.

Thanks,
Adam
Promethean Technical Support

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