Weekly Review: Dynamics GP Passwords, Case Sensitive Logins and ODBC Connections

 

Yeah, the title is a little weird. Here is the background. A client was moving terminal servers. Old server and new server were both pointed to the same Dynamics GP source. Users would log in to one terminal server and everything worked fine. When they logged into the other terminal server, GP would lock and their password needed to be reset. It didn't matter which terminal server a user logged in to, the first one they logged into worked fine, the second one hung and required a password reset to use that terminal server.

I know, what does the terminal server have to do with a GP password?

Well Dynamics GP uses the User ID and the server name in the ODBC connection as part of the hash when encrypting the user password for the first time. In our case, one of the terminal servers had the SQL Server as a fully qualified domain name and one just had the server name. So the weren't exactly the same and it broke the ability to decrypt the password.

This is also why user logins are case sensitive. The ASCII characters are different for upper and lower case letters so different information is passed when encrypting upper case vs. lower case passwords for the first time.

To solve our little problem we made both server names identical in the ODBC setup and then we reset the passwords of the affected users.

Huge thanks to Rob Mitchell of I.B.I.S. for the background behind this. He is the one who actually solved this issue.

Copy and Paste Issues in Remote Desktop

Many folks use Dynamics GP over a Citrix or Terminal Server connection. At Dynamics GP Land, Steve Endow takes a looks at the problem of copy and paste breaking between the server and the local machine. Usually, stopping and restarting the RDPClip service will work but sometimes you just have to disconnect and reconnect.

GP Debugger and Citrix

Merit Matters has a new post up on the quirks of using GP Debugger via Citrix.

GP Login Performance Over Remote Desktop

Frank Hamelly is back blogging with a post on troubleshooting a login performance problem he was having with GP and remote desktop. I won't spoil Frank's fun by giving you the answer. You'll have to read his post!