I agree with you 100% and I want to add my comments. 

I have seen a few posts here as well as having a client that has a Linux server. In two cases these were large accounting firms that recommend Simply to their clients AND they are NOT happy. 

Generally larger firms, the ones that Simply is targeting with its new Enterprise version run networks and a good percentage are client/server versus peer to peer. And of those client/server networks, more and more of them are migrating to Linux.

I truly hope that Sage moves quickly on this issue.

The connection manager was builded using Microsoft .NET 2.0 so it might be possible to run it on Linux by using Mono. http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page

It should not be too hard for Simply to provide a connection manager for Linux.

I am sorry to hear about the difficulties you are having with the new version of Simply Accounting. To have Simply Accounting run on a Linux network, we would recommend adding a windows computer to the network and store the database on this computer. You can then schedule nightly backups to your Linux network. You would then also still be able to access the computer via the network using VPN.

We have not tested our product on any non-Windows operating system, as indicated on our box and in our documentation. You can also find the requirements here. We cannot guarantee how our product performs or whether it works correctly under these operating systems. As a result we cannot recommend running our software on a non-Windows operating system. We do realized there are some users who have found this to be a limitation on the use of their Linux/Unix servers, but they are able to add the additional Windows computer to the network and backup the database to their servers.

Hope this will help you with configuring Simply Accounting in your network environment.

Alistair Ellis

Product Manager

Sage Software

Hello Micheal,

Sorry for not responding sooner. The backup up task I was referring to is not part of the Connection Manager but a task that is scheduled through Windows. If you go to Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Backup, then select Advanced mode, you can add a nightly backup to backup selected files/folders to your Linux Server. The Connection Manager releases the databases when Simply shuts down, so there is no need to stop the Connection Manager service. When setting up the backup select Disable shadow copy, as no users should be using Simply when backing up the data. Also be sure to change the schedule occurrence from Once to Daily.

 HTH.

 Alistair Ellis

Simply 2009 comes in a couple of weeks. You should wait until then. That is the time to see if they listen to you or not; when they release a new version.

Mike,

Sorry to hear that you and your peers have decided to move to a different accounting solution for your business.

I would like to let you know that Simply Accounting 2009 will have a Linux connection manager available as a download later this month. We did in fact listen to our customers and made the decision to pursue a Linux solution for the customers impacted by our change in databases last year and the requirement for a windows server to store their data on. We are supporting RedHat Enterprise 5 and SuSE Enterprise 10. The connection manager will run on other versions of Linux, but may require modifications to the installation procedures. We will be providing a forum for our customers who are using other version of Linux to share there solutions and find answers to questions they may have regarding using the connection manager in this environment.

At Sage, we do listen to the customer and we do incorporate their feedback into our product as we develop and plan for upcoming releases of the product. It is not always possible to address issues in a current release, and sometimes not even in the next release, but we do strive to address the more common issues.

 I do hope you will try the Simply Accounting 2009 release before changing your business to a different product. If not I do wish you the best of luck with your new product and hope it will assist in your business growth.

Regards,

Alistair Ellis

Hi:   Just one question.   Knowing very well that this was a horrific problem for some users and it had been well discussed on this forum,  why did it take the people coming back almost a year later to report on what they had done before any mention of Sage deciding to support Linux in the 2009 version was mentioned on this forum.  To me that is a complete lack of concern by Sage for the frustration that customers have gone through with the 2008 update (and others in the past).  Since Sage is the one that makes this forum available for customers, why hasn't someone from Sage been more helpful in keeping the information flowing?   Rita Deering

I apologize if not communicating this sooner, but our release is literally coming out this month. We were formulating our release plans over the summer. Original idea was to take after the green guys and only allow enterprise clients to have the Linux Connection Manager. After some internal discussions, it did not make sense to us that only users on Enterprise would need this solution. You all were using Linux servers before our Enterprise product came along, therefore it seems straight forward that you are not necessarily on Enterprise and still want this solution.

We did not communicate anything to you our customers about this when we started investigating solutions, as we did not want to commit to something that we may not be able to deliver on. We were hoping to have the Linux connection manager out with the Release C of SA2008 in June, but there were complexities to be over come with the Linux environment, and we need to test internally before putting it out to the masses to be sure the changes we made to the program did not cause data issues with the databases. We needed to modify some underlying code to allow the connection manager to use the Linux version of MySQL. We had special builds from MySQL to accommodate the difference between Linux and windows environments and we needed to ensure these were going to be made available from MySQL in time for our release as well. Due to the changes in the program, the Linux connection manager will not work with the SA2008 product, just the SA2009 product and future releases.

I responded to everyone now as our business partners have now been made aware of the Linux connection manager and other product enhancements as of last week. I did not want everyone to think we did not care for your business needs or that we were not listening. We will be making our official announcements later this month outlining the other enhancements in the Simply Accounting 2009 product.

Hi again:  Nice try but it doesn't wash!   All you had to say was that you were doing your utmost to accomdate all Simply users and that you were very hopeful that the problem would be taken care of by the time you were able to do the 2009 release.  How hard would that have been?  Even if you hadn't been able to accomplish it by then at least the customers would have had a time frame to be hopeful about and could have perservered for awhile knowing that Sage cared.  You left them will the TOTAL understanding that you DID NOT CARE.    That is inexcusable in my opinion when you were indeed trying to come up with solutions.  You are dealing with companies that HAVE to take care of their books.  You are dealing with companies that have to pay bookkeepers for extraordinary down time!    And you don't think that it is important to communicate continually when you are sitting there thinking up things that you can do to change the program every year whether it needs changing or not?   There are probably millions of Simply Accounting users out there and they are not using it "just for the fun of it".  They are using it to keep track of their business records and it MUST perform properly and as they are used to.  You cannot just keep "surprising" your users.   That is arrogant in the extreme.  It is a VERY SERIOUS situation for Simply users all over the country to have to have this horrendous learning curve every year.   Have you not heard of the old saying "If it's not broke, don't fix it"?       Finally coming out and saying that now we can tell you that we have come up with a solution to the Linux problem ends up being "Too little too late" for that accounting company that was trying to get reassurances from you and got no understanding from you or no ongoing communication.  An accounting firm no less.  How could you at Sage have been so blind to their dilemma?   Just one users opinion but hey, I'm sure there are many more users out there who are the ones who use the program daily and again, hey, what do they know.       Rita Deering  

I've asked for that as well during the beta and so far they have no plan for it.

􀂃 Windows 2000

􀂃 Windows XP

􀂃 Windows Vista

􀂃 Windows Server 2003 R2 and 2008, and Windows Small Business Server 2003

􀂃 Linux SuSE Enterprise Server 10

􀂃 Linux Red Hat Enterprise Server 5

It works the same way. No update were made to it for some time (version 1.1).

David,

We are still requiring the Connection Manager to connect to the database. Did some searching on the internet, and there is a Mono.NET for Unix. The Connection Manager for Linux can be downloaded from the Simply Accounting web site here. There are insturctions on setting up the CM on Linux, and you can use these as a guide to see if you can setup the CM on Unix.

We have had clients set up the CM on other Linux systems than RedHat and SuSE, and in principal the Mono.NET for Linux and the Mono.NET for Unix address the issue of allowing the CM to run on those operating systems.

HTH,

Alistair 

fluid,

We selected the RedHat Enterprise and SuSE Enterprise distributions as these are common server distributions and are also what our mid-market product ACCPAC supports.

In regards to getting a debian distribution created, I will need to look into having this done. In the interim, have you tried using 'alien' to convert the package to a deb format? 

We do not have the necessary steps to get the Connection Manager running on other distributions of Linux as we have not gone through the process of installing and running the program on other distributions. There have been clients who have managed to do so with some modifications to the installation steps we provide. I will make another request for having a Linux forum area added to this community, so these users have a set place to provide everyone the steps required for their version of Linux.

Regards,

Alistair

I've successfully installed this on Gentoo Linux (x86) and i'm in the process of making an ebuild for it that will be available on (at minimum) bugs.gentoo.org and hopefully the sunrise overlay as well.

I'm hoping that a (multilib) x86_64 system will be able to run this as well. (edit: x86_64 multilib seems to work fine for me)  I think non-x86 Mac systems are out of luck, though, without a VM.

You can find the ebuild here:  http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=267101

Dispite my best efforts, I haven't been able to get the connection manager working reliably with Gentoo.  Even though all of the distinct parts seem to work, and I can eventually get it to the point that no errors are reported or logged anywhere, I believe the issues come down to specific requirements of specific versions of the software installed on RHEL5 and SUSE10. 

Fortunately, for my purposes I'm only backing up data to my linux servers now, and simpy having the daemon running (regardless of whether it or samba is configured properly or not) allows my windows box to complete the backup and verify the backup successfully without error.  (TBH, it seems like it just checks if a connection manager exists and doesn't require that connection manager to actually do anything)

Specifically on the Debian/Ubuntu issue, there will never be an official package for this simply because of licensing issues (there isn't even a license available for the connection manager)..  This is going to be a major hinderance for anyone that isn't a linux "power user" because it means you're forced to do a manual install.  It may be possible, once someone has worked out all of the details, that they will provide a .deb package for debian/ubuntu.

Unfortunately (due to the issues I just posted about the specific versions of dependencies) I doubt that this will ever be the case.  Debian and Ubuntu stable both use newer versions of many of the dependencies, and iirc it is a very large pain to use packages that are older than current stable.

As Max mentioned, no there isn't any way to do that with Simply Accounting 2008.  Simply 2009 can (theoretically) through the installation of the Connection Manager, but Simply Accounting 2008 is not supported by the Linux Connection Manager.  See the 2nd or 3rd posting on page 2 of this thread.

The reason why you can't simply open company files on the shared folder, is because of the way Simply Accounting works now.  The Simply Accounting software determines the ip address of the physical storage location -- that is either localhost (for a local harddrive), or the IP address of the samba server.  Then, it connects to that IP address at port 15431 (or whatever the port is, I can't remember), which is served by the Connection Manager daemon that must be running on the system that data is physically stored.  The Connection Manager then receives (from the client) the path to the company data, reverse-maps it to a local path, and invokes the special-built MySQL daemon on that local path (where it opens its various database files).  The Connection Manager then proxies between MySQL and the Simply Accounting software (the client).

Note that this may not exactly be correct, btw, it's just what I've figured out from watching what happens during my debugging.

Long story short, for Simply Accounting 2008 and above, you _must_ have a Connection Manager installed and running on the system that physically stores the data, whether that be windows or linux.

Unknown said:

(Simply Accounting) is the only one I have come across with this awkward setup. I can't understand the technical need for it. These are just simple database files. The only thing I can think of is a seat licensing issue, or perhaps a file-locking issue, in which case there are other, easier and more convenient ways to do this

It's just speculation, but I think the reason has more to do with Sage's development methods than anything.  #1, they wanted to make multi-user access easier so they licensed MySQL and proceeded to hack the back-end to suit their data needs (probably for security and such too). #2, they built a wrapper around the MySQL daemon so that all of the client-server communication can be managed via their own .NET software development, allowing them to make communications between the two proprietary (probably for seat licensing, as you mentioned).  Their .NET stuff connects to the MySQL back-end via ODBC so they didn't have to develop anything special for that, and they can ofuscate the client/server connection any way they see fit.

Having the wrapper start and stop the MySQL backend also saves them or the end user from having to install MySQL as a database service, and allows a certain level of abstraction about the locations of company data -- so end users can (more or less) put the data wherever they want and still access it exactly the same (more or less) as they did with Simply Accounting 2007 and previous.

Unknown said:

Anyway i understand the mechanism behind all this but I was just hoping there was a way to shut the connection manager off and just let Simply Accounting OPEN A FILE :S

Yeah, it'd be nice...  Unfortunately, Simply Accounting 2008+ doesn't know how to open a file, it only knows how to talk to a Connection Manager.

 Hey fluid,

I asked the R&D team to take a quick look into seeing which Deb files to use. They were not able to see exactly which files match up. Below is their response, I hope it does help point you in the right direction.

I read on the mono website that Mono is available in Debian and Ubuntu releases.  In Ubuntu releases, it is installed by default.  http://www.mono-project.com/Other_Downloads (best viewed using Firefox)

As for the version, the latest one available at the time of development is Mono 1.9.1.  So, this is the version we used for our testing as well.  In our readme, we listed the following files:

The following files are needed when you install Mono:

*       libgdiplus0-1.9-2.1.i386.rpm

*       mono-core-1.9.1-3.1.i386.rpm

*       mono-extras-1.9.1-3.1.i386.rpm

*       mono-data-1.9.1-3.1.i386.rpm 

*       mono-data-sqlite-1.9.1-3.1.i386.rpm 

*       mono-winforms-1.9.1-3.1.i386.rpm 

*       mono-web-1.9.1-3.1.i386.rpm

If he is asking about the equivalent file in .deb for, say, mono-core-1.9.1-3.1.i386.rpm.  I looked at the name of the mono files for Debian/Ubuntu, and they look kind of different and it’s hard to tell which .deb is equivalent to which .rpm file.

So, I have compiled the following (short and detail) descriptions for each file.  They are obtained from our Redhat machine.

libgdiplus0-1.9-2.1.i386.rpm - libgdiplus: An Open Source implementation of the GDI+ API.

Package Details:  libgdiplus: An Open Source implementation of the GDI+ API, it is part of the Mono Project

mono-core-1.9.1-3.1.i386.rpm - The Mono CIL runtime, suitable for running .NET code

Package Details:  This package contains the core of the Mono runtime including its Virtual Machine, Just-in-time compiler, C# compiler, security tools and libraries (corlib, XML, System.Security, ZipLib, I18N, Cairo and Mono.*).

mono-extras-1.9.1-3.1.i386.rpm - Provides the infrastructure for running and building daemons and services with Mono as well as various stub assemblies

This package provides the libary and application to run services and daemons with Mono. It also includes stubs for the following .NET 1.1 and 2.0 assemblies: Microsoft.Vsa, System.Configuration.Install, System.Management, System.Messaging.

mono-data-1.9.1-3.1.i386.rpm - Database connectivity for Mono

Package Details:  This package provides a Mono assembly to facilitate data access and manipulation with databases, LDAP compatible directory servers and/or XML data exchange. Beyond the ADO.NET, Novell.LDAP and System.DirectoryServices assemblies, it also includes a command line sql application as well as the Microsoft SQL Server and ODBC data providers.

mono-data-sqlite-1.9.1-3.1.i386.rpm - sqlite database connectivity for Mono

Package Details:  This package contains the ADO.NET Data provider for the sqlite database.

mono-winforms-1.9.1-3.1.i386.rpm - Windows Forms implementation for Mono

Package Details:  This package provides a fully managed implementation of System.Windows.Forms, the default graphical toolkit for .NET applications.

mono-web-1.9.1-3.1.i386.rpm - ASP.NET, Remoting, and Web Services for Mono

This package provides the ASP.NET libraries and runtime for development of web application, web services and remoting support.

I am not sure whether this will help him or not; but hopefully Debian/Ubuntu does provide description of the package (before/after install) if it has any…

 Hey fliud,

I talked to the R&D team, and they can provide us with a SRPM for the connection manager. They are currently busy wrapping up our SA2010 project, but can have this done for mid-July.

I hope this will still fit into your timeline.

Regards,

Alistair Ellis

Instead of trying to convert the RPM to a deb, i would recommend using rpm2tgz and then untarring the result, and if necessary making a deb from that.

The binaries -are- 32bit, so if the copy of debian/ubuntu you are running is pure 64bit then you will have issues; afaik though most 64bit distros are multilib, in which case you should still be able to run the binaries.  I have no issues (well, no additional issues) running SimpyConnMgr-2.2-1 on 64bit gentoo systems, nor did I have any additional issues with 2.1-1.

Regarding Fedora, as long as you use the exact dependencies specified (which are old, btw -- chances are good that you will have issues getting these exact versions with any recent release of Fedora), then there wouldn't be any significant difference between Fedora and RHEL.

BTW - the only thing that I use SimplyConnMgr for is to support backups from within SimplyAccounting onto a network drive.  For this, it works reliably (allows backup verification to proceed, etc).  If this is the same case for you, then you shouldn't have any issues getting it to work.  I have yet, with the limited experimentation that I've done, gotten SimplyAccounting to reliably use its data files directly off of a network share.

Unknown said:

...the first instance gets the connection manager going, starts the database, returns the connect string and promptly dies(verified this with the sdk).. leaving the database running but no connections. every instance after that works fine.. so long as it is started before the connection manager times out from the first launch, once other connections are made the database caries on happily.

I'll have to do some tests to confirm, but I believe this has been my issue as well when I try and open the simply files stored directly on my servers as well (at present I only use this so that backups can be successfully verified). 

Unknown said:

although while thinking about this, since simply uses a XML config file it would make sence to me to put some configuation info in there that allows us to set up a fixed mysql server that the local connection manager can connect to, seeing as the connection manager is connecting via ODBC any way and the ODBC link doesn't have to be on the local machine.. (just a thought, i realize the connection manager was a simple at the time way to switch from the old Jet database to MySQL, but its been 4 years now and you would get a huge performance increase to drop all these data layers you've built up just my $0.02 )

Although that would probably work in a number of cases (i'm guessing most companies only have one set of datafiles), I'm not sure that it would work as a general solution because of the way Simply is using mysql -- that is, (and this is my theorizing here, since i don't have any means of confirming it) mysql is used as an interface to the simply files, and so it's an intermediary instead of an end.  That is, the simply client app tells the connection manager to open a specific set of files, which then launches the (probably severely modified) mysql daemon on those files so that client-to-server communication can occur.  So as long as Simply's data files can be manipulated on the filesystem (copied, moved, whatever) and opened "directly" no matter their location (assuming connection-manager satisfaction, of course) I don't think there's a way to set it up to use a dedicated/external mysql server.

it's kind of too bad -- I wonder if it would be possible to provide both functionalities through the addition of say, a new file type that would essentially just specify the required connection info (server address, etc) to a dedicated mysql server/connection-manager setup..  It would be really nice if I could open the simply datafiles directly from my server without needing samba...  It might be tricky to set up the dedicated mysql server / connection-manager pair, though, especially for non-techs...