Open Dental

If you use encryption, you need a password to access your encrypted files. The files are only as secure as your password. Picking a decent password is a science. Few people care to learn about passwords but if you have ever used certain versions of Linux and you use a weak password, Linux cracks you...

I agree with the above post. We just past our 2 year anniversary switching from Softdent to OD. I still consider Softdent to be the most comprehensive package outside of OD. We switched away from Softdent when they were going to require a $10,000 upgrade in hardware and software. We already have all...

I guess I had hoped for a more obvious notification that there was trouble with a disk. I am sure that the software that comes with the unit would tell me that there was no disk or a bad disk, but I would prefer not to have to check with the special software every time. The portability of the unit p...

Cobian looks like great software. I will have to give it a try. The only time I seem to end up with a vhd file is when I virtualize a running machine. My personal desktop machine just started to go bad so I virtualized it because it had so much stuff on it. I didn't want to reinstall tons of stuff I...

This weekend I replaced the 2.5" disk drives with hybrid drives. With RAID 1 and two hybrid drives the boot up of Linux is almost instantaneous. This little RAID enclosure is transportable across machines. The one problem I have is that I removed one of the drives to see what kind of dead disk warni...

Everything is on the VM, all services, all files to be backed up, the bat file, everything. Stop all the services that will interfere with your backup. Place the bat file on the desktop of your VM. Right click the bat file and select "Edit." Change the bat file to back up your special files and chan...

@echo off :: variables set drive=F:\OD-BU set backupcmd=xcopy /s /c /d /e /h /i /r /y set folder=%date:~10,4%_%date:~4,2%_%date:~7,2% ::%backupcmd% "D:\Images\*.*" "%drive%\%folder%\Images" %backupcmd% "D:\OpenDentImages\*.*" "%drive%\%folder%\OpenDentImages" %backupcmd% "D:\ServerFolders\SharedDocu...

I am mildly surprised that someone got this up an running so easily. I am glad for that. I suppose you must have had to tweak your recall numbers, didn't you? My son wrote this program for me after seeing me labor manually looking up all this information in the charts. Needless to say, we are all st...

The little enclosure I have only has room for two 2.5" drives and does not allow for the option of anything other that RAID 0 , RAID 1, JDOB and one called PM or something that I have never heard of before. If you do the more advanced RAID levels, you will really be needing at least three disks and ...

That is more or less what I do too. I have a clone of my server at home and I take my data update and push it to the clone. Now I have an exact replica of my officer server at home which I could move to the office if I needed to. When I refresh the data on the clone, I can check that everything is t...

I think you stop most network services like so: net stop MySQL This is going to change depending on what you are shutting down. You may need to do a taskkill or something else. If you google it you should find an answer. MySQL is a network service and so it can be killed with net stop. Other service...

There are a million ways to defraud a business of which stealing payments is only one. I am told a common one is setting up a fake business that sends bogus bills to the practice which are paid to the crooks. Overstating write-offs is also common. Hopefully, this tread can be built into an automated...

OK, that looks better. Thanks!

import MySQLdb a=open("daysheet.txt", 'w') db = MySQLdb.connect(host="server", # your host, usually localhost user="root", # your username passwd="", # your password db="your database name") # name of the data base opendental is the default cur = db.cursor() cur.execute("SELECT * FROM appointment a...

I tried to edit my post of the python program but the message board strips out leading spaces. I can write in [tab][tab]for row in ... to signify that there would be two tabs for indentation on this line, but I won't bother unless there is some interest. I suspect anyone interested in tackling this ...

I don't think the Audit Trail feature is intended to do what you would like it to do. It appears you are investigating the possibility of fraud and the audit trail will give you a heads-up about that but you are probably going to need custom queries to look deeper in some issues. I have thought this...

I run my server in a VM. To do backup, I shut down the services that will lock database files and double click on a .bat file that backs up the important files. You shut down services by right clicking on the computer icon and then go MANAGE and then to the service you wish to stop, ex, MySQL, right...

I would stay away from RAID 0 unless you are very tech savvy. You don't need the speed, most likely, and it can really complicate your life. RAID 1 mirrors two disks in case one goes down. Microcenter has a small enclosure the size of a 3.5" drive. It holds two 2.5" laptop drives. You set a setting ...

I just reviewed my post and I see that line indentations have been dropped in the python program. The program will not run unless this is changed. If you know python you will be able to fix this easily since you will know where the indentations are supposed to be. When I posted the program the inden...

I thought this would be worth sharing. It is somewhat technical but I see there are many tech-heads who use OD. Our office pre-screens every patient at the beginning of each day. We check whether the patient needs premedication, has allergies, takes meds, for health conditions, delinquent treatment ...

Please don't get rid of autonotes! We have very strict charting requirements here in Minnesota and autonotes allows me to chart to these requirements very quickly and easily. If you offer an alternative, please don't throw away autonotes.

My office is searching the web for msds's in pdf format. We intend to try to find all of our data sheets and keep them in a file on the computer in our office. I would be glad to post these sheets to a wiki page and I would really appreciate being able to take advantage of the work others are puttin...

I think the thing that keeps getting overlooked in the backup discussions is the network settings are not backed up with file by file backup methods like Crashplan appears to me to be. Jordan is right on when he says backing up your data will keep you from going out of business. Everyone here is loo...

To joshuab: You can rebuild the database if you backup the image directory for Schick. The directions are on the disk that came with CDRDicom. I would love it if Jordan built a PACS server for everyone's Dicom images. Maybe it is intended to be part of the A-Z folder at some point since that seems t...

You are sure right to be thinking about this before it happens! It is interestesting that you said "your server goes down." How it goes down makes all the difference in the world. If the work horse of your computer goes bad, namely the disk drive, you are golden if you have a clone. If your server g...

We are already using Schick in our office and we are considering XDR. Does anyone have any experience using more that one digital xray system in the office? What are the ups and downs of having one DH take pictures with a Schick sensor and another take them with XDR? Can the images be stored in the ...

My problem is not with OD, it is with the Schick xray database that uses MS SQL Express. This database product does not behave well in a pseudo server environment. My paranoia centers around the fact that a server crash would not only take my data, which is backed up, but also all my network setting...

Because I am using Windows 7 Pro for my server, it is very difficult to make the network connections to MS SQL from the work stations. I know this would be much easier in Windows Server products but I would really like to be able to run this whole system under Linux in MySQL or Sybase. It would have...

Hello everyone, I am new to Opendental and I would like some input. I converted from Softdent to OD and I am delighted with everything about OD. I love the freedom of having the data much more transportable that it was in Softdent. As I read the old posts about changing OD to MS SQL it concerns me b...

In our office we back up 3 different ways. We have a server with a very inexpensive add on that accepts a sata drive through a five inch slot in the front of the machine. I added this to a regular box I bought at Microcenter. 1. So we do serial backups with a different drive for a different day on a...

This is fantastic!
I installed OD on Ubuntu 11.10 running in Virtualbox with a Windows 7 host.
I am having some graphics issues but it does run.
Great work! I love it.