Best Practices

Disabling Polling

Once the RACC application is installed and configured, normally you will enable polling, test the functionality, and leave it polling continually. This way HDS support personnel can establish a connection and perform remote support when they need to.

However some customers may be reluctant to have this capability continuously enabled. In cases such as this, you may show the customer how to connect to the RACC application and only enable polling when the customer is aware of it and permits it.

In order to give the customer access to RACC, you can either give them the administrator password or create a new user account for them. You may also need to configure hardware and/or software firewalls to allow remote access to the RACC application.

Hosting RACC

When the RACC application creates a tunnel into the HDS support group, ideally HDS support staff will not have access to anything more on the customer’s LAN than they need to access.

The best practice is to install RACC on a stand-alone workstation that supports Windows Firewall with Advanced Security and use the RACC User Interface to configure the firewall so that the system has access to nothing other than devices that HDS is contractually obligated to support. This way, when HDS support personnel Remote Desktop into the RACC host, they will only be able to Remote Desktop or telnet to the devices they need to support. It is not recommended to install RACC on the SVP of storage systems as changing the firewall settings can affect other applications that are running on these systems.

Passwords

While not strictly enforced by the Hi-Track RACC application, RACC users should use strong passwords. A strong password is at least eight characters in length and includes a mixture upper and lower-case letters, numerals, and other non-alphanumeric characters.