Hi All

As a promoter of thin client technology, I must warn everyone that all
is not as it seems in the thin client game, I hope the attached
correspondance with Wyse may save someone from making an assumption, as
I did, that the U in USB stands for Universal.

Regards
Donald Pittendrigh

From: "D. C. Pittendrigh" <[email protected]>
To: "Technical Support" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Technical Support Question Form
Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 20:26:39 +0200

FW: Technical Support Question Form
This short answer makes the USB port useless as it is no longer
"Universal" The drivers are supposed to be installed on a directory on
the server, the thin client is supposed to be able to deal with it if it
cannot, we will have to find another thin client device which can, or
which has PS2, serial, or USB prots that work like the rest of the worlds
USB ports do.

Please respond to this ASAP as I need to know if I must throw out this
equipment or not.

Good luck
Donald Pittendrigh

----- Original Message -----
From: Technical Support
To: '[email protected]'
Cc: Raymond Rogers
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 5:58 PM
Subject: FW: Technical Support Question Form

Donald:

The short answer to your question is the converter is not compatible.

If the converter were compatible you'd still need an appropriate
Durapoint pointing device driver installed within the wt3200 firware to
work through the USB port, and Wyse has no such driver installed.

Rey Castro, Wyse tech support

Support Request Form

Please fill out the following information completely to better service
your request.
Also, please indicate how you would like us to contact you.

-----------------------------
Name: Donald Pittendrigh
Title:
Company Name:
Address Line 1:
Address Line 2:
City:
State/Province:
Postal Code:
Country:
-----------------------------
Model Number: Winterm 3200LE
Part Number:
Serial Number:
-----------------------------
E-Mail Address: [email protected]
Telephone Number: 0834607393
FAX Number:
-----------------------------
Please contact me ASAP?
Contact me by E-Mail? Yes, Contact Me by E-Mail
Contact me by Telephone?
Contact me by FAX?
-----------------------------
Enter the nature of your support request:

Why am I unable to get a simple USB / PS2 converter to work on the USB
port of my device?

I need to connect an industrial Durapoint pointing device to a machine
which will be used for an industrial application, only USB or serial
interface is available on the pointing device and the operation requires
that the Winterm may not be fitted with a keyboard to prevent any
operator intervention and also as there is simply no room for a keyboard
on the machine.

Thanks for your help.

----------------------------------------------
Details:
Remote IP Address of Sender:
198.54.202.2
Remote Host Name:
198.54.202.2
Connection Info in case of access authentication:
Not available
User ID in case of access authentication:
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User Browser and Operating System:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)

 

I don't work for Wyse, but I need to step in here and point out that you
have a clear misunderstanding of the capabilities of USB.

> It seems relatively clear that your USB port is therfore not
> a USB port as we cannot plug USB devices into it, other than, correct me
if
> I am wrong, your own keyboard and the mouse which is plugged into the
keyboard.

USB requires both hardware and software. The cabling and hardware allows
the devices to talk the same protocol, but there needs to be a specific
driver for each type of hardware. Just look at the things you can plug into
a USB port. I can plug mice, keyboards, digital cameras, hard drives,
scanners, ethernet adapters, serial adapters, etc etc etc. These devices
have nothing in common except for the USB plug.

> This therfore raises some secondary questions.
>
> 1) Why do you sell these units and advertise that they have 2
> USB ports available , when they don't in fact have any.

Because they do... they just can't install every driver known to man on a
thin-client, not to mention not every USB device known to man has a Windows
CE driver.

> 3) If you cannot solve this problem are you going to take the
> units back, as you have cleraly mis-represented their features to the
public.

You didn't know enough about USB and made assumptions that things would
work. Desktop computing is NOT embedded computing. Just because it says
Windows on it doesn't mean that you're going to be able to go down to Best
Buy and buy stuff off the shelf that will work with arbitrary hardware.
You've got to do a little bit of research to find exactly what you can pull
off the shelf and plug in.

I also wonder why you decided to jump into a public forum and start blasting
Wyse before talking to their support staff.

 

Donald,

The units support non-Wyse USB peripherals that are listed under the
supported peripherals section of our web site. The USB ports on our devices
are fully compliant to the USB spec. The Wyse units support USB the same
way that any other Microsoft CE client supports USB. Wyse is fully
compliant to the "WBT" spec of CE from Microsoft and is tested for this
compliancy by a third party testing company before our devices are logo'd.
Our advertising is all based on compliancy of these industry standards.

The driver for the USB peripheral must be installed on the device since
Citrix does not support USB redirection on thin clients OR PC's. There are
not as many peripherals with CE drivers as there are peripherals with
standard Windows drivers. This is also a very common problem with Linux
based devices since many vendors are still not providing linux drivers with
their devices.

We have a lot a CE device drivers in our devices. However, not every vendor
makes a CE device driver for their peripheral. The third party CE drivers
we have on the CE device are typically for printer and modem support, or
things like wireless connectivity. Most POS wedge type devices do not
require a specialized driver and will connect into the PS2 port on the
keyboard or the PS2 ports on our clients. We also have devices that have
full legacy support with serial, parallel, USB and PS2 ports on the device.
The units are the 8360 and 3360 in the micro tower form factor. They are
also listed and displayed on our web site.

USB is supported at different levels across the industry based on the OS.
This is true on any device, PC, handheld, thin client, etc. The support of
USB on Wyse products is as follows:

On the Wyse Embedded NT units (8000 series - USB and Legacy I/O form
factors) you can install any peripheral that has a Win32 driver. Please
note that Microsoft does not even support USB on NT - even on a PC. This is
funtionality that Wyse has added so that we can support USB devices on our
NT based units.

On the Wyse CE units (3000 series - USB and Legacy I/O form factors) you can
install any peripheral that has a CE driver that Wyse has added to our
product.

On the Wyse Blazer units (1000 series - USB form factor only)you can install
any peripheral that Wyse has written a driver for (on the peripheral support
page). The 1000 series supported USB print direction under ICA before
Citrix supported it. This was custom coding available on Wyse boxes only.

I do not know which of our units you have been testing.

Supporting the peripheral on the client by installing the drivers on the
SERVER does not work with any device including a PC and will not work until
Citrix and Microsoft add USB redirection services which they are currently
working on. They have already added this support for serial and parallel
redirection so that functionality works today (using software on the server
for a LOCALLY installed serial or parallel device).

If you are working with a Wyse SE or Salesperson (or through our support
group) there is also a process to request the support of specific
peripherals. At regular intervals support is added for new devices based on
customer requests.

Regards,

Brad

 

FW: Technical Support Question Form
Hi Brad

It seems relatively clear that your USB port is therfore not a USB port as we cannot plug USB devices into it, other than, correct me if I am wrong, your own keyboard and the mouse which is plugged into the keyboard.

This therfore raises some secondary questions.

1) Why do you sell these units and advertise that they have 2 USB ports available , when they don't in fact have any.
2) Do you have a constructive proposition to solve the problem, which requires a non-Wyse device to be connected to the system via either PS2 or serial ports, which I may add I do not have either of on the 3200Thinterm, and don't recall seeing on any of your other Thinterm units either.
3) If you cannot solve this problem are you going to take the units back, as you have cleraly mis-represented their features to the public.

Regards
Donald Pittendrigh

 

Donald,

Ray CC'd me on the last message and I wanted to make sure one of the technical issues was clear.

The reason we cannot use drivers installed on the server for a USB device on a thin client is because neither Citrix nor Microsoft currently supports USB redirection. They do support serial and parallel redirection which allows you to have drivers and applications for serial or parallel devices installed on the server but used on the device.

Wyse has developed several workarounds in our software to address this problem, but unfortunately none that would fix the problem you're having. Another solution we provide is our Embedded NT device which allows any Win32 drivers to be installed on the thin client itself. As Wyse was Microsoft's NTe Partner of the Year last year I think you'll find that we are ahead of
the game in many of these areas. We are also working agressively with our key partners Microsoft and Citrix to get USB redirection supported in their standard product as soon as possible.

Thank you,

Brad Rowland
Director - Product Management
Wyse Technology

Office 408.473.1816
Email [email protected]

Wyse Technology
3471 North First Street
M/S: 617-3
San Jose, CA 95134-1801