Note that, if, after reviewing the information below, you're still having issues,
the Ticker Tape Agent Troubleshooting Flowchart can be used to guide you step-by-step
through determining exactly what the underlying issue is .
In order for messages from the Administrator to be display by a Ticker Tape Agent installed on a
workstation, a number of prerequisites must already be in place as described in the Deploying Ticker Tape - Overview topic. Briefly, these are;
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A Message Control File location for the Site in question must be in place, with the correct
permissions
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The Site should be configured correctly in the Administrator software
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The Agent software on the workstations associated with a Site must be correctly
configured
Expanding upon the above;
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The Message Control File location should ;
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Be accessible to the Administrator software and the permissions configured on it should
allow the Administrator software to both read and write to the location or, in the case of
FTP or HTTP-based Sites upload and download.
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Be accessible to all of the Agents associated with that Ticker Tape Site, allowing them
to read from the location - they do not need to write to it. In the case of FTP or
HTTP-based Sites, the Agents will just need to be able to download, via HTTP, from the
specified location
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For the default and preferred UNC-based Site type, the MCF should be a normal Windows
Share or full UNC path of the form \\servername\sharename or \\servername\drive\directory
respectively. Examples of each form could be \\USBOSFILE\TickerTapeShare and
\\USBOSFILE\C$\Apps\TickerTapeMCF
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For FTP-based Sites, the MCF Upload Location will be the place to which the
Administrator software uploads messages to via FTP, while the Agents will download them
via HTTP. Consequently, although the locations are actually physically the same, the Upload
and Download MCF will be specified differently with the Agent configured during install to use the MCF
Download Location
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For HTTP-based Sites, the MCF Upload Location will be the place to which the
Administrator software 'posts' messages to a receiving PHP script via HTTP, while the Agents
will download the message via HTTP also (exactly as they would for a FTP-based Site.)
Consequently, there is an additional element of configuration at the receiving server to put the PHP
script for each Site in place. The location from which the Agents download messages is fully
controlled by the PHP script that processes the uploaded message from the
Administrator
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The Site configuration within Ticker Tape must accurately reflect the Message
Control File location detail ;
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For the default UNC-based Site type, the MCF Upload & Download Locations are
normally the same and should correspond to the Windows Share name or full UNC path as
described above. Note that it is possible for the MCF Upload and Download locations to use
different conventions to refer to what is in reality, the same place (i.e. the Administrator
may upload to a full UNC path, while the Agents are configured to download from a
normal Windows Share name which represents exactly the same location )
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For an FTP-based Site, the MCF Upload and Download Locations will be different
as the Administrator software will use FTP to upload to the defined location, while the Agent will
download via HTTP from the same physical location. As well as the different protocol (indicated
by the 'ftp://' and 'http://' prefixes), it's often the case that the public HTTP 'view' of a web site
differs from the 'view' exposed when using FTP to access the underlying directories and files - in the
example below, this is apparent as the Upload path includes the 'httpdocs' directory which is
itself the base (hosting) directory for the HTTP web site and, as such, isn't specified as
part of the MCF Download Location;
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For a HTTP-based Site, the MCF Upload Location that the Administrator software 'posts'
the message to must represent the physical location of the PHP script that will process the posted
message for the Site. The MCF Download Location is, as usual, the place from which the Agents for that
Site will download the message from; however, its location is wholly dependent upon where the
processing PHP script is configured to save the 'posted' message to - which could technically be
virtually anywhere you wish. Fro more detailed information, see the 'How do I... Configure the PHP receiver
script for a HTTP-based Site? ' topic ;
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The Agent software on the workstations associated with a Site must be
correctly configured;
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The Agents associated with a particular Site should be configured to poll that Site's
MCF Download Location for messages.In the case of the default and preferred UNC-based Sites, this will be a Windows Share
name or UNC path, for a FTP or HTTP Site, this will be a HTTP address
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If
appropriate, for simplicity, use the Agent Maintenance Wizard to deploy the Agent to the
workstations in a particular Site as the Agent is then guaranteed to be correctly configured (though
always test on a small number of workstations first before a mass roll-out!)
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If installing the Agent without using the Agent Maintenance Wizard - manually, or via
a login script or SCMM for instance - refer to the example command line shown when configuring the
Site as this gives a functionally correct MSIExec command line tailored for that particular
Site. The screenshots above show several examples of this.
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