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[Rebex] better handling of ANSI Recording files

Hi,


i miss two things in the Dashboard View "ANSI Recording".


1.) It would be nice if i can export more than one ANSI File at a time. This is a very important feature for us (we've a lot of short rebex sessions every day) . 


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2.) In addition to that a "multi-logfile-textsearch" would be perfect!

 

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hi, export is not necessary because you can copy file from folder. but integrated search will be nice feature. Filip  

When i open *.ans-files direct in notepad++ i see a lot of escape sequences and "Convert to UTF8" doesnt change anything. I'm not an encoding specialist...so please feel free to give me some tipps for a better readability of ANSI Files with an external editor.



Hi Sven,


the ansi files used in Royal TS are in a special format used to "play back" the session. When you select an ansi file in the dashboard you will see by default the text representation (without the escape characters) in the lower part of the dashboard:

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This is a conversion done by Royal TS. You can select all the text and copy it to your favorite editor or you can use the Export button to export it as text file.


I hope this helps.


Regards,
Stefan

Thank you stefan, i know that. 


But as i wrote in my first post...we've a lot of short rebex sessions every day and sometimes (days later) we search for a specific event on a specific day. In the past we opened simultaneous 20 or more putty text logs in notepad++ and searched for a string in all logs...in one step. 


At the moment we cant reproduce this quick workflow with ANSI Logfiles (1:1). The only way i see is to export every single ANSI-Log...on by one. :-/ Thatswhy i wrote this thread.



Btw...


Apropos "play back". Very nice feature but i miss a "skip forward/skip backward"-function...to quickly jump to the next (or last) keyboard input. Sometimes interruptions without keyboard input are just too long for the previously implemented "fast forward"-feature.


I'm not sure if the skip feature is possible but I will look into it.


For the ansi log files, I can think of two solutions:

  1. Automatically create a .txt file with the content of the stripped ansi file as shown in the dashboard by default. This would be created automatically upon disconnection but could take some time, depending on the log size.
  2. A button in the toolbar or export menu entry which allows you to create those text files on demand (even for multiple files)
The second solution wouldn't be that much of effort to get in... Would that work for you?

Regards,
Stefan


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I have a similar problem when converting really large ANS files to txt. So maybe it is a solution to add an option for default output format so you can choose if you want to have ANS files with playback support or if you would prefer txt files. The second option would be to add the converting function to the Powershell Module so it is easy to convert files in an automated way. Best Regards Michael Klose

Just realized that you can also enable Logging with log level Verbose which creates a pure text representation of the session's data. This can be enabled in addition to the ANSI recording. Could this be helpful?


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Hello Stefan,

we're also looking for a solution for this problem.

I've tested the option to do additional verbose logging. But in the *.log-file is no Output form the console, so this is not an alternative.


Greetings

Frank


We will have a look after the V5 release and see if we can come up with something useful...

Hi Stefan,


I originally purchased Royal TS for RPD session management and then started adding SSH connections. I like the ANS logging playback capability but would agree with others on this thread about being able to bulk convert ANS to text files.  I have been a long time SecureCRT user and have always logged to text files. One thing I miss with Royal TS SSH logging is the ability to customize file and folder naming and location. I use the following string for logging all my sessions which creates a new folder based on date (if it does not already exist) and then logs to that folder with a custom filename format.:


H:\Session Logs\%Y-%M-%D\SessionLog_%S_%Y-%M-%D_%h%m%s.log


I did find some reference to custom log file naming in some Royal TS documentation but must have been for an earlier version.


BTW: Royal TS is really an awesome product, thanks for your work!


Sincerely,

Dale

Hi Stefan,


 real example: I am doing change on almost forty machines. I do this change via amazing "Key Sequence Broadcaster". Now I have to create evidence for it. So logs is best option but if I will want to use export session but just for one export i have to 4 time click write some name of file and enter . This I have to do almost 40 times like monkey.


Do you know about any workaround?


My idea was to have all session in last one hour on one place but i dont think it is possible.


Thank you

Hi Filip,


this is indeed tricky. I'm not sure how to improve this scenario. You could maybe write an external script which traverses all the ans files and strip the ANSI codes out of the file to create the text file.

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