Randem Systems Support Board

These are issues with the Admin Console or the Client:

1. Some stations do not have the "Firewall Settings" highlighted in Stations->Computer->Station Settings->Firewall Settings. Even some with the icon.

2. If there is no "Firewall Settings" and icon, "Synchronize Settings" will not work. At install these settings are present but soon disappear on some stations.

3. The stations that have the "Firewall Setting", have in the "Application Rules" a Category "Remote Admin" which has all the rules that were set on the Admin Console.
The stations that do not have the "Firewall Settings" highlighted do not have this category.

4. All AVG services are started on all stations and set to "Automatic" except "avgbIDSAgent" which is set to "Manual".

5. At install time all stations show up in the "Admin Console" but some stations disappear after a short time.

6. Need to delete from the admin console and install the client over itself multiple times to get the "Firewall Settings" and the icon to show.

7. "Test Connection" in "Remote Admin" does not work properly. It does not give any indication that it is working or failing.

8. "Check Station Availability" states that the station is online. "Gather Diagnostic Data" just continues to appear to do something but nothing is being done. On stations where "Firewall Settings" appears
"Get Diagnostic Data" returns "Station has supplied incomplete diagnostic data".

9. Only the initial install will connect the client stations to the console. After that some stations will disconnect and not connect again. Even though some show the icon like it is connected the last contact time never changes. This is intermittent with stations, some work and others do not. There is no rhyme or reason for this behavior. The only way to get the disconnected stations to reconnect is to re-install the client, then the process start over again. some of the connected stations will disconnect if restarted.

Installation Troubles and Solutions

If you are having trouble with the Admin Console showing your client computer then loosing the icon, this is a sign that the "Firewall Settings" is not working. The way that we have found to correct this is to delete the client computer from the "Admin Console" then re-install the client over itself. This somehow correct the problem with the icon and "Firewall Setting". AVG has no clue about what causes this issue or even a solution for this.

In BotBanish 3.6.01 you may get the error
PHP Warning:  Use of undefined constant BOTBANISH_TIMEZONE - assumed 'BOTBANISH_TIMEZONE'

This error can be fixed by adding the following code to the Settings_Client.php file that is found in the Client Folder of BotBanish.

Find:
if (!defined('BOTBANISH_LOCAL_ANALYTICS') || BOTBANISH_LOCAL_ANALYTICS !== true) {

if (!defined('BOTBANISH_USER_ID'))
define('BOTBANISH_USER_ID', '0');
}
Add After:
if (!defined('BOTBANISH_TIMEZONE'))
define('BOTBANISH_TIMEZONE', 'Pacific/Honolulu');


If after installation of BotBanish and upon usimng your forum you get the error message Field 'updated' doesn't have a default value. This means that the import of one or all the support tables has not occurred. You can download and import the attached files and import the data using phpMyAdmin. After the import of the tables your application will be able to run normally. The imports may fail on installation due to timeouts on some host systems that will not allow the installation to import them.

This should be corrected in version 3.6.01

Hi,
Hope all is well there.

Just noticed that 3.6.00 is available, so I downloaded it.
I tried to uninstall 3.5.02 and install 3.6.00, but when I uninstalled 3.5.02 I could no longer access SMF.
I restored and everything is backup.

What am I doing wrong?

If you are running on a Centos Server with Linux with PHP 7, a PHP 7 handler will at some point be placed into your .htaccess file and cause a conflict with BotBanish because of specialNot a valid attachment ID. characters that the handler places into the commented text. To eliminate this issue find in the BotBanish_Subs.php file that is located at /BotBanish/bot/Subs/ the following routine:

function BotBanishHTACCESSReadFile($htaccess_name = BOTBANISH_HTACCESS_NAME) {

 $htaccess_data = '';
 $replace_char = '@^@';

 if (file_exists($htaccess_name)) {

 $htaccess_data = file_get_contents($htaccess_name);

 // Let's attempt to fix an improperly formatted file

 $temp_data = str_replace(array("\r\n", "\n", "\r"), $replace_char, $htaccess_data);
 $htaccess_data = str_replace($replace_char, PHP_EOL, $temp_data);
 }

 return $htaccess_data;
}

and replace it with the code in the attached file. The code cannot be placed into this message because the special characters will be replaced and that is not what we want.

Another source of 500 Internal Server Errors can be attributed to what is in your URL. if it contains any of these sequence of characters, a 500 series error will present:

md5|benchmark|union|select|insert|cast|declare|drop|alter|else|case|switch|require|include|isset|foreach|global

You can change this behavior by removing the sequence of characters from your .htaccess file from these lines or by changing the URL that uses these sequences of characters.

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^.*(md5|benchmark|union|select|insert|cast|declare|drop|alter).* [NC]

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^.*(else|case|switch|require|include|isset|foreach|global).* [NC]

Thank you for sharing

If running Apache 2.4, Bot blocking may not seemingly be happening. In the .hatccess file please remove the following line to restore bot blocking.

ErrorDocument 403 /BotBanish_AccessError.php

This line causes the bots to be sent through the BotBanish system when an Error 403 "forbidden" code happens.

This behavior will be corrected in BotBanish 3.5.03.

Thank you,
Have a great and healthy new year