Mapped Drives Lost when Updating Open Dental

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Rickliftig
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Mapped Drives Lost when Updating Open Dental

Post by Rickliftig » Mon Mar 21, 2016 4:44 am

This has happened through several updates to Open Dental. After updating, my mapped drive (V:\GENDEX (used with Vixwin bridge)) drops its connection and has to be re-mapped. I've learned how to handle this, but it's an annoyance. And it doesn't happen on every workstation - go figure! The windows 7 computer seems to be relatively immune; most of the issues are on Dell Optiplex 780s running Windows 10.

Ideas anyone?

Thanks in advance,

Rick
Another Happy Open Dental User!

Rick Liftig, DMD FAGD
University of CT 1979
West Hartford, CT 06110
srick@snet.net

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Ardavan
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Re: Mapped Drives Lost when Updating Open Dental

Post by Ardavan » Mon Mar 21, 2016 5:13 am

Very strange, mapped drives are a windows feature and updating OpenDental only does the following:

1) Overwrite the OpenDental application's files with the updated files (On all machines)
2) Make a copy of the OpenDental database (The first time the new version is run)
3) Modify the database to update it to the latest version (The first time the new version is run)

None of these operations should have any effect on windows mapped drives, however there may be a relation:

If OpenDental is installed in its default location (The Program Files folder) then only a user with administrator privileges has the right to modify files in this folder. If I remember correctly mapped drives are a user level setting, so if you've mapped your drives for the regular users but not the administrator, when you log in as the administrator to apply the updates the drives you mapped under the user's account would not be available.

What I have done is written a startup script which maps the requisite drives and placed that in the startup folder for "All Users", this way even if a new user logs on for the first time they have access to the maps.

On this note, do keep in mind the dangers of encryption ransomware, and the fact that it targets network shares and mapped drives in addition to what is on the local machine. I am seriously considering moving all our images to the database to help protect against the likes of crypto locker and the such, I'm just concerned that we have over 160GB of images on disk and that it may take up even more space if stored in the DB. As far as I know the malware isn't yet targeting MySQL, and even if it does I could protect the MySQL folder by not allowing users access to it.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who will laugh at this joke, and those who won't. ~Annonymous Bug Writer

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Rickliftig
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Re: Mapped Drives Lost when Updating Open Dental

Post by Rickliftig » Mon Mar 21, 2016 5:24 am

Ardavan wrote:
None of these operations should have any effect on windows mapped drives, however there may be a relation:

If OpenDental is installed in its default location (The Program Files folder) then only a user with administrator privileges has the right to modify files in this folder. If I remember correctly mapped drives are a user level setting, so if you've mapped your drives for the regular users but not the administrator, when you log in as the administrator to apply the updates the drives you mapped under the user's account would not be available.

What I have done is written a startup script which maps the requisite drives and placed that in the startup folder for "All Users", this way even if a new user logs on for the first time they have access to the maps.
Hmmmm - -now that makes sense! I was totally puzzled by this too - what would one have to do with the other?

And I wish you didn't mention the potential of ransomware - that scares the bejeezus out of me!

Thanks!
Another Happy Open Dental User!

Rick Liftig, DMD FAGD
University of CT 1979
West Hartford, CT 06110
srick@snet.net

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Ardavan
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Re: Mapped Drives Lost when Updating Open Dental

Post by Ardavan » Mon Mar 21, 2016 6:26 am

Its been scaring me too so I've spent the past week or so researching how to protect against it and prepare for how to deal with it in case it does strike. Ill share my findings on this forum once compiled.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who will laugh at this joke, and those who won't. ~Annonymous Bug Writer

tgriswold
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Re: Mapped Drives Lost when Updating Open Dental

Post by tgriswold » Mon Mar 21, 2016 5:32 pm

Note that most of the things you have mentioned Ardavan are only required to be done by the first person updating. Which given a specific update process can be a trusted IT or other experienced staff member to log in as Admin on the server. Everyone else just needs access to the local directory for OD. Which is not really an issue to give full write access to all users on a client machine. If something encrypts your OD directory nothing is lost, you just reinstall windows and OD.
The issues mainly lie with the AtoZ folder and having open access to your database location from all workstations. I haven't played around a ton with security settings in mysql but the database itself, it should be possible to only allow access to the mysql file directory on the server itself. The MYSQL service is the only thing that really needs to touch the database at all. Workstations should not need to have file directory access to it. Note that a malicious user could use that open mysql access to mess with the DB, but that would be a much more complex attack than a crypto virus.
However, I do not have a good answer about how to handle the AtoZ folder. That is something that the workstations have to be able to have access to. And of course bridging and backup software throws another wrench into everything i've written above. But in general, you should be able to have your mysql database locked down and relatively safe from any sort of malicious file based attack if implemented correctly. Of course if the crypto gets onto the machine hosting the mysql database itself it pretty much a lost cause, but you can limit the distance one could go from running on a client machine (where office staff is most likely to introduce it).
Travis Griswold
Open Dental Software
http://www.opendental.com

bpcomp
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Re: Mapped Drives Lost when Updating Open Dental

Post by bpcomp » Tue Mar 22, 2016 2:53 pm

The most we would lose is one day of data with the crypto virus. My server is a virtual machine running on a linux host. Every night I have a script that clones our server. From then on our full server with domain and all our patient data and xrays are moved around to a backup server and then an encrypted USB drive all in a Linux environment that windows can't talk too. You could encrypt everything on our server and all the workstations and it would suck, but I'd just load up the backup virtual machines and have to do a few updates and we would be back up and running with data from last night.

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