Fields problem FAQ for paid customer.docx
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1. Can you help me We are not able to sort out field issues for anyone unless you can provide actionable information In other words you have to isolate some possible causes You can either read various technical articles in the See also section below or provide a reliable reproducible sequence that can help us to recreate the exact problem in our lab so we can further work on the issue to see if there is something our software can improve If you are not able to provide actionable information then we are pretty much blind on that issue and thus won t be able to help you That s why we offer trial evaluation for customers so we reduce the risk of this situation happening We suggest users to compare the good ones those without this problem and bad ones and provide more clue for us to recreate the problem in the lab And no we cannot assist you remotely using TeamViewer or similar methods well at least not freely See also Common steps to isolate field problems System Integrator s Manual How to handle Out of Memory issue Genius Vision Product Documentation Why can t you use TeamViewer to assist me remotely What is actionable information for problem reporting Examples of inactionable information When looking at a field problem we are often fed with inactionable information meaning that we are told the fact that a field problem has occurred but there isn t an action we can do about it Let us give a few examples of in2. Preface am experiencing software crash recently how can do am experiencing Out Of Memory error what do do An unknown cause in the field has stopped the software from working normally Can you help me What is actionable information for problem reporting Examples of inactionable information Guidelines Two sides of the story Resource issue Recreating a problem in the lab is not possible and need your help Why can t you use TeamViewer to assist me remotely Common steps to isolate field problems Change a computer Rebuild the whole system Recording disks periodic health check or replace Examine network bandwidth Utilize SafeMode Read through all technical documentation am having emergency problem in the field can you help me What are the task scheduling issue What are consultant services Preface Before you read any FAQ entries please make sure you have read following documents in detail e System Integrator s Manual e Howto handle Out of Memory issue Firstly we are very sorry that you are experiencing one or more field issues Let us express that our R amp D team is prepared to help you within our ability but please understand there is a limit to our problem solving ability and there is a certain ways in helping field problems Some of the limit are simply the resource limit as implied by the intrinsic nature of a software developer company such as ours Everything in this document is deducted from our st
3. actionable information e Your software crashes very often How to stop the crash and make it work normally e It looks sometimes audio is not recorded correctly and happens randomly How can fix it e I m experiencing Out Of Memory error and crash Please fix it ASAP e I m using an IP camera with your software and can t see video The information given in these examples though describing customer unsatisfaction vividly does not provide us a clue for anything that is actionable We are pretty much blind on these issues as you are For us to be able to help you you need to at least provide some actionable information Guidelines Following are some guidelines for this kind of information It should contain a list of possible causes for us to have a direction in order to further investigate It should provide some clues that allow us to try to recreate the exact problem in the lab You can directly suggest what actions we can do about the issue You can tell us what you have done to the system that you are not sure that is correct Sometimes you might have inadvertently tripped by some internal system conflict ON Two sides of the story A good piece of actionable information will have two sides of the story the good and the bad By analyzing and comparing the good and the bad often reveals some important clues among the unknowns A common error made by many users is that they only report problems but forget to report wh
4. andard license terms which you have already agreed at the time of purchase and from the experience of last decades IT evolution Since IP video is intrinsically an IT derived technology the users of our software must be familiar with the IT environment See also e P video surveillance is not for everyone I am experiencing software crash recently how can do See An unknown cause in the field occurred that stopped the software from working normally Can you help me I am experiencing Out Of Memory error what do do We have collected some general direction about this problem in the following technical article e Howto handle Out of Memory issue Generally speaking this is not a problem we can solve If you indeed run out of memory then there is nothing we can do Memory limit is a physical constraint like if you only have a limited space ina warehouse you cannot put too many stuff inside that warehouse If you think there are other factors involved that you think this is not actually an out of memory problem you need to isolate the factor in the field to a level that the issue can be recreated in the lab or provide other actionable information otherwise there is still nothing we can do because the problem is not necessarily caused by the software it might be caused by improper system configuration or user operation which we can t be made aware of An unknown cause in the field has stopped the software from working normally
5. ask force whenever a user submit a request unexpectedly Just remember following simple rules 1 Any efforts take time 2 Anything that takes time needs to be scheduled ahead 3 Anything that must be put to engineer s schedule must have a good business cause This is where you explain to our sales department how much effort we should put into resolving your issue The more business information you provide the more quickly we can decide how to schedule the task What are consultant services Consultant services are paid services and are only available through our distributors It creates a conduit to allow our strong R amp D capability to help on high profile projects Contact us if you want to understand how to become a distributor and therefore get access to our consultant services
6. at was before the problem or what is aside the problem Let us give a few examples e Asystem can be running fine for 6 months and suddenly stopped working Then the user just reports the system stopped working without mentioning it s been running 6 months fine By analyzing what was done right before the system stopped working could reveal vital clues of any possible actions e A user could have installed 3 systems and out of the 3 2 is fine and 1 has problem Then the user just reports the 1 that has problem without mentioning the other 2 is fine By comparing the three systems could reveal vital clues of any possible actions Resource issue Please be noted that even actionable information is provided it doesn t necessarily mean the problem will be solved It merely present a possibility that the problem could be solved through some actions meaning that without it it s not possible to do any actions let alone solving any problems When actionable information is provided there is still a matter of how much resources are involved in order to perform that action If your information is too vague it could take impossible or unreasonable amount of resources to perform the action against the problem you reported This is where you explain to our sales department how to justify the effort we put into resolving your issue The more business information you provide the more quickly we can decide how to schedule the task For more information ab
7. ce problems that can be diagnosed simply by remote assistance is very limited Most of the time it s just an inefficient use of our time That s why it has became a paid consultant service For unknown field problems we still think the best way to help is for you to provide us with actionable information Common steps to isolate field problems Change a computer This is always the first step that can effectively rule out many environment factors Try not to blame the software first because no software can run perfectly in all combination of all computer components Rebuild the whole system If the system starts good and became bad later then it could be something or someone has tampered the system It could be a good idea to rebuild the whole system from scratch to rule out tampering factors Recording disks periodic health check or replace Hard disks are known to wear out after prolonged usage Building an NVR server with old disks is particularly risky because old disks may contains bad sectors that may lead to data corruption Some disks are equipped with self repair function that automatically moves data from bad sectors to good sectors so it does not show damages in an obvious way but the self repairing mechanism takes time and therefore reduces the overall bandwidth The read write heads of a damaged disk could also cause the disk to become much slower To reduce this risk you should periodically engage maintenance to your NVR sys
8. out task scheduling please review What are the task scheduling issue See also e Why can t you use TeamViewer to assist me remotely Recreating a problem in the lab is not possible and need your help If recreating a problem in the lab is not possible then it s high unlikely the problem can be solved in any time soon It s just like if a surgeon wants to fix a patient he can t just open the body and cut a random vessel or nerve it could lead to catastrophic result All we can do is to speculate the cause and try to recreate the problem in the lab Alternatively you can try to provide actionable information Why can t you use TeamViewer to assist me remotely Firstly using TeamViewer to help anyone is a very expensive task for us It disrupts all R amp D tasks scheduling and often provides unreliable access bandwidth amp availability to the target computer making this an even more expensive task If you insist on that we assist you remotely you can hire us as consultant to do the job Secondly even if our engineers managed to connect to your remote server and see the problem we don t have the proper equipment we need to diagnose anything In order words there is very little chance for remote assistance to produce actionable information Not to mention there are a lot of diagnostic factors that are unavailable to remote assistance such as e Network bandwidth e Network connectivity e Access response time In our experien
9. tem by measuring disk performances If the performance is degraded since last measurement it could mean a danger signal that the disk is about to be irreversibly damaged Examine network bandwidth There are many readily available tools on the Internet that help you to do that Example includes iperf and NetMeter It can give you the objective view of how much bandwidth you are giving into the NVR Utilize SafeMode SafeMode is a NVR software feature that provide an alternative software startup sequence with certain functions disabled Please refer to user s manual for more details Read through all technical documentation Genius Vision NVR is a highly sophisticated professional software It s possible the information you need is simply buried somewhere inside the product documentation Most of the time a user who isn t familiar with the software could be responsible for messing up a working system due to user errors so it s really a good idea to get familiar with the software by reading through all its documentation I am having emergency problem in the field can you help me We are very sorry you are having an emergency problem However due to the task scheduling issue we are not able to help any emergency problem unless you hire us as consultants What are the task scheduling issue The thing one must understand is that we can t anticipate anyone s schedule Our R amp D is continuously in development and we can t just interrupt our t
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