pfSense bandwidth limiting guest vlan wifi and scheduling. pfSense never ceases to amaze me.

So, my trusty-dusty Unify networks coupled with the amazing pfSense, are all working SUPER well. By allowing wifi for the guests at one of my clients has hosed another initiative – live streaming FROM that same facility. Note how those 2 things fight eachother? Options? None as it is located in a residential neighborhood and T1 bandwidth and any faster BW are not available. We are with the phone provider and the cable provider will give slightly better BW at twice the price (eg 1.1 the BW for 2x the price).  Therefore since we have pfsense, we need to learn about pfSense bandwidth limiting and scheduling.

So getting another Phone line adsl is an option for $620 / year, but lets BW limit the guest network first, and get some stats/quality metrics on the video streaming first as that is just a good idea. Here are 2 links – just follow them and add a 2nd IDENTICAL firewall rule for VLAN traffic, but it only kicks in when the streaming is going (always the same time each week) and put the limiting in place.

Getting XYZ or Navisworks Insertion Point through automation .net or VBA

Here are the steps and sample code I made to learn about getting the navisworks insertion point or midpoint of a component. I know how to find the component by its id (I am using AutoPLANT component id), now I know how to find the midpoint of that component or the location of that component.

Steps to find the navisworks insertion point

  • Accessing the file units and location information using Navisworks .NET API
  • A pdf primer on Navisworks basic objects and how those objects are related (key resource)
  • I made some VBA to put pause points and look at objects as they went by. In short
    • start with a path object – in this code example – the currently selected objects (so select one to keep it easy!!!)
    • Pause points/Interest points are the Beep lines which might have been replaced with Debug.Print lines
    • In our example, I am looking for AutoPLANT components with a unique id that would similar to “AT_HSHF31AB_2Q7” (the 2nd set of strings is the doc id and the last part is the unique AutoPLANT part id in that doc)
    • look for through the code below for  *********** ANSWER *********** to get where we get the Navisworks Insertion or midpoint of our component

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Screen Capture for demonstrations software – Windows

There are a few “free” lists but there is also a few links of people’s favorites. I have a friend looking into this as well and here is the list we have come up with. I will be trying the ones marked in ** (Jing is too simple (really simple to use too!!). Then I tried Recordzilla and I didn’t try #3 – sadly – I got my work done with Recordzilla and the total full featured price is $43 – should I look further?) :

GetObject(,”classNameHere”) only works the first time. Why?? A look into the ROT table, Navisworks and other apps too that use ActiveX

Hours of frustration. So I have all these great plans to develop my “click here and view in Navisworks” ideas. Dozens of good plans and I am thwarted by it only running once. Googling, there are other people with other apps that “only work once” when you are connecting to RUNNING instances of them via ActiveX.

Bottom line: when using GetObject “Navisworks.Document.10”) and ensuring you can connect to the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. times, you have to choose ‘document.StayOpen’. This sets a special flat in the ROT table (keep reading) to tell it not to go away when you are done with it. You application wil LOOK like it is running and it is,  but the reference to it being ‘grab-able’ is gone. Microsoft applications have Application.UserControl = True, which does the same thing, this (on hour #3 of researching what was going on) inspired me to see if navisworks had anything. Nope, nothing – it didn’t work – EXCEPT for the StayOpen is not a property but a method that sets this flag to True. Holy smokes – it all works and every time now. I CAN COMPLETE MY DREAMS I HAVE IN MY HEAD NOW!!! The motivation, is that we have to give a presentation to the customer’s VP. No pressure 1 week before we are doing this. I will be working the weekend to impress the client’s VP and having a job for the next little while.

Links and learning  to follow – you can stop reading now if you wish.

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