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BrightSign Players and User-Agent in log files

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JRB Technical
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Hello:

About a year or so ago, I had made an feature request for a small change in the way BrightSign Players report their "User-Agent" back to web servers when they access information.

Currently they respond like this:

BrightSign/4.7.112 (XD1230)

I requested that something like the last 6 digits of the Player Serial Number be added to that information, so something like this:

BrightSign/4.7.112 (XD1230) (002207)

The reason for this is so that I (and others) can better Audit customers using Media RSS Feeds, HTML, and other web data tracking.

For example, I have one client with over 20 players all coming from the same IP address, and they are all the same model players all with the same Firmware versions.  There is no way for me to tell how exactly how many players are accessing the feeds, other than I can make an approximation based on bandwidth used over time.

I was told that this should be possible, and would be added to the list of feature requests for future versions.

Is there any update on if and when this might happen?

Thank you!

John

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7 comments

  • 0
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    Romeo

    Hi John,

    Since FW 5.0 you can set the User-Agent in BrightScript by using the below (extracted from the 5.0 user manual)

     

    SetUserAgent(user_agent As String) As Boolean: Changes the default user-agent string reported by WebKit. The following is an example of the default user-agent string, as sent by an XD1230:

    BrightSign/4.7.85.2-8-g1a6e6f6-td-debug (XD1230) Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Linux mips) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko)

    Chromium/18.0.1025.168 Chrome/18.0.1025.168 Safari/537.4

     That should allow you to set it to whatever you want.

    Romeo

     

  • 0
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    JRB Technical

    Hello:

    As I explained before, the BrightSign Players are not mine, they are my customers. I can't make them make script additions/changes like that.

    That's why I was hoping for a upgrade on BrightSign's side for this, I was lead to believe this was in the works.

    There really needs to be a way for content providers to distinguish one player from another when accessing content from our servers.  There is no other way to easily distinguish multiple players of the same model and firmware on the the same remote IP address.

    It is more likely that they will update BrightAuthor and Player Firmware at some point.

    This really needs to happen if at all possible.

    Thank you.

  • 0
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    Romeo

    Hi John,

    This is probably not something that you'll see been implemented in BA natively, but it can be achieved via a plugin. Can you please send a presentation that's expected to do what you've described?

    Thanks,

    Romeo

  • 0
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    JRB Technical

    No use in sending a presentation, it has nothing to do with presentations. It has to do with telling how many players are accessing the same content over the internet to prevent feed theft.

    Funny, I was told back in 2013 that this would be added to the feature request list. I guess that never happened.

    So I guess I will have to change the way I do things now, and create a separate feed URL for every single individual player that customers have.

    They won't be happy about that, I am not happy about it. But it seems now that will be the only way I can distinguish how many of the same model BrightSign player with the same firmware are coming from the same IP address.

  • 0
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    Brandon

    What some customers have done is include the player's serial number in the URL query string.

    That would get  logged separately by the server.

    You can create a variable set as a System Variable that gets the Serial Number, then embed that in the query string as $$variablename$$

  • 0
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    JRB Technical

    I had to find this thread again.

    I wanted to say thank you to BrightSign, for adding the feature I requested.

    Now for more current versions of firmware, the Serial Number, Firmware, and Model are reported in web logs:

    (Serial Number redacted in example)

    "BrightSign/R3G77JXXXXXX/7.0.60 (XD233)"

    I recently had a client that was having issues, and was able to look at the log files, and tell them exactly which model/serial numbered players were using an old feed URL.  Made troubleshooting very easy to be able to single out a few out of a large batch of players, and client could then easily locate and correct.

    Again, Thank You!!!

  • 0
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    JRB Technical

    Dear BrightAuthor Developers,

    I have one more future feature request along these lines.

    When BirghtAuthor Validates URL's, or gets webpage content for Preview, etc., instead of the User-Agent being blank like it is now, can you please have it send BrightAuthor and the version? Example:

    BrightAuthor (4.7.2.5)

    This way people can tell which accesses are coming from BrightAuthor and what version in the server log files.

    Thank you!

    John

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