Canon UniFlow software - appearance of blank users...

[Snowy190uk]

Hi Everyone,

I found this forum while trying to search for the above software official forum - seems support for UniFlow is a little limited from Canon - I wonder if you may be able to help...

I work for a large health care provider with the HQ building using this system. A few months ago the server failed and had to be rebuilt from a backup image we luckily had due to a HDD failure, however, when we now look at the Users section in the Server management > Base Data section, there are thousands of blank/empty users listed. It claims we have 19,788 users on the system, however the 'real' users only begin to be listed from page 1281 onwards (15 users per page), so there should roughly be only 585 'real' users.

Not being an SQL boffin I was wondering if there is a way to do a bit of house keeping and remove the blank users (and if this is likely to do anything silly to the system?). I notice that when you select an individual user from the list there is a delete button within the properties of the users account, but I'm damned if I'm going to do that 19,203 times! They're not causing the system to slow, or any other visible problems at the moment so no urgency to delete them - its just plain annoying.

To date, we have no idea why so many blank users just appeared.

Any ideas?

[thomasf]

Re: Canon UniFlow software - appearance of blank users...

Hi Everyone,

I found this forum while trying to search for the above software official forum - seems support for UniFlow is a little limited from Canon - I wonder if you may be able to help...

I work for a large health care provider with the HQ building using this system. A few months ago the server failed and had to be rebuilt from a backup image we luckily had due to a HDD failure, however, when we now look at the Users section in the Server management > Base Data section, there are thousands of blank/empty users listed. It claims we have 19,788 users on the system, however the 'real' users only begin to be listed from page 1281 onwards (15 users per page), so there should roughly be only 585 'real' users.

Not being an SQL boffin I was wondering if there is a way to do a bit of house keeping and remove the blank users (and if this is likely to do anything silly to the system?). I notice that when you select an individual user from the list there is a delete button within the properties of the users account, but I'm damned if I'm going to do that 19,203 times! They're not causing the system to slow, or any other visible problems at the moment so no urgency to delete them - its just plain annoying.

To date, we have no idea why so many blank users just appeared.

Any ideas?

Hi Snowy,

I am sorry to hear that you had / have a bad experience in getting support for our product. This should never be the case and something we're taking very seriously.
I'm sure that we are able to help you short term, not only with cleaning up the database but also finding out why these accounts are created empty in the first place.

I will send you a PM with an email contact and some more information that would be required for us to get back in touch with you.

Kind regards,
Thomas Fick
Support Director
www.nt-ware.com

[wseyller]

Is there anyway to export the data to excel to make edits there then import it back it.

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk

[thomasf]

Re: Canon UniFlow software - appearance of blank users...

Is there anyway to export the data to excel to make edits there then import it back it.

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk

Hi Wseyller,

That's not a good idea. We have ways to clean up the database via SQL. However, we would need to find out what the underlying problem is and why these empty users are created in the first place.

I already sent a PM to Snowy with my contact details, unfortunately my last post is still waiting to be published by a moderator.

Regards,
Thomas

[Snowy190uk]

Re: Canon UniFlow software - appearance of blank users...

Hi Wseyller,

That's not a good idea. We have ways to clean up the database via SQL. However, we would need to find out what the underlying problem is and why these empty users are created in the first place.

I already sent a PM to Snowy with my contact details, unfortunately my last post is still waiting to be published by a moderator.

Regards,
Thomas

Hi Thomas,

Thank you, I received your PM. A colleague of mine is also looking at this who has more experience with AD and exchange servers than me. It's become clear that every time the email extension changes (eg: our organisation has changed from joe.bloggs@domain1.com to joe.bloggs@domain2.com) it see's them as a new user (even though they're using the same AD account, domain and login details), and generates a new PIN for them.

However, due to the fact we have a long-standing issue with the system not emailing out the auto-new PIN email, it just goes to compound the problem as we then have to log into the system and individually email them.

In a more recent email, my colleague has stated to Cannon UK Support...

"We have tried to connect the server to our new active directory domains to allow the users to print. Upon syncing the ldap connections the system recorded 20000 blank user entries."

Just to add to the complications, we work over a substantially large shared network infrastructure, with multiple domains, some shared (set up as trust relationships etc...) so its not straight forward at the best of times.

I think there has been a job logged with Cannon UK Support - we are awaiting a response.... (I cant imagine this is an easy one to untangle )

[thomasf]

Re: Canon UniFlow software - appearance of blank users...

Hi Thomas,

Thank you, I received your PM. A colleague of mine is also looking at this who has more experience with AD and exchange servers than me. It's become clear that every time the email extension changes (eg: our organisation has changed from joe.bloggs@domain1.com to joe.bloggs@domain2.com) it see's them as a new user (even though they're using the same AD account, domain and login details), and generates a new PIN for them.

However, due to the fact we have a long-standing issue with the system not emailing out the auto-new PIN email, it just goes to compound the problem as we then have to log into the system and individually email them.

In a more recent email, my colleague has stated to Cannon UK Support...

"We have tried to connect the server to our new active directory domains to allow the users to print. Upon syncing the ldap connections the system recorded 20000 blank user entries."

Just to add to the complications, we work over a substantially large shared network infrastructure, with multiple domains, some shared (set up as trust relationships etc...) so its not straight forward at the best of times.

I think there has been a job logged with Cannon UK Support - we are awaiting a response.... (I cant imagine this is an easy one to untangle )

Thanks for the details.
It would still be great if you could send me a PM or direct email with the details I asked for. I will then follow up with Canon UK and offer our help via the official route if needed. I am sure you provided some log files which will be helpful for us to look at.

Cheers,
Thomas

[ChetRichUni]

Re: Canon UniFlow software - appearance of blank users...

Hello All,

I am having the exact same issue as Snowy190uk.

We had the exact same issue where the server failed and we didn't have a backup and so had to build a new server and ask Canon to assist with the installation and configuration of the UniFlow server.

Everything was working fine until we powered off a 2003 DC which caused issues with the LDAP syn and while troubleshooting that issue I discovered these blank records. I can delete them but each time the LDAP sync runs they reappear.

I spoke to Canon and they said that it was an internal Active Directory issue where we have black users in AD and we have to find the blank users and delete them. I am not convinced as you cannot have blank users in AD. I did get the SQL guys to run a check on the database and that is fine.

We are running Windows 2016 Data-center (VM), 4Gb memory, 2 vCPUs. UniFlow version 5.4 SR8.

Any Help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Chet

Hi Everyone,

I found this forum while trying to search for the above software official forum - seems support for UniFlow is a little limited from Canon - I wonder if you may be able to help...

I work for a large health care provider with the HQ building using this system. A few months ago the server failed and had to be rebuilt from a backup image we luckily had due to a HDD failure, however, when we now look at the Users section in the Server management > Base Data section, there are thousands of blank/empty users listed. It claims we have 19,788 users on the system, however the 'real' users only begin to be listed from page 1281 onwards (15 users per page), so there should roughly be only 585 'real' users.

Not being an SQL boffin I was wondering if there is a way to do a bit of house keeping and remove the blank users (and if this is likely to do anything silly to the system?). I notice that when you select an individual user from the list there is a delete button within the properties of the users account, but I'm damned if I'm going to do that 19,203 times! They're not causing the system to slow, or any other visible problems at the moment so no urgency to delete them - its just plain annoying.

To date, we have no idea why so many blank users just appeared.

Any ideas?