Software Review: KopyKat (Hilgraeve)

By Bill Kredentser

I am scrambling. I wrote the following review a year ago. Today, my stepson Jeff is doing a demo of a product at the August 1996 OS/2 SIG meeting. I am in danger of seeing him publish his review before I publish mine, even though he's doing his demo a whole year later. So the time has come.

On August 8, 1995 I submitted the following article to Vickie Sceifers, the editor of our PC User Group newsletter, DOWNLOAD. I expected the article to appear in the September 1995 edition of DOWNLOAD. Following the article, you can read all the lame excuses and sob stories.

At the July 27, 1995 meeting of the OS/2 SIG of the Cincinnati PC User's Group, I had the unique privilege of demonstrating a software package called KopyKat, from Hilgraeve Inc., the people who brought you the HyperACCESS Lite product in the WARP BonusPak. KopyKat is remote control software, meaning it lets you operate one OS/2 PC from another.

THE PLAYERS
To run a remote control package, you need 2 computers: HOME                     WORK System maker:          DEC                       NCC CPU:                   Intel 486SX@33Mhz         Intel 486DX@50Mhz BIOS:                  Phoenix                   AMI Monitor:               DEC 14" color             DEC 14" color Video adapter:         S3 integrated on          Diamond SpeedStar 24 motherboard with 512K    with 1M VRAM ResolutionXColors:     SVGA 640X480X16           SVGA 640X480X256 System RAM:            12Meg                     16Meg Hard disk drive:       120Meg                    540Meg Diskette drive(s):     3.5"                      3.5", 5.25" CD-ROM:                 None                      None Mouse:                  PS/2 style on mouse port  Serial mouse on COM1 Printer:                None                      None Modem:                  Hayes external V-series   Hayes internal                         ULTRA Smartmodem          OPTIMA Smartmodem                         Data only 9600 baud       Data+Fax 9600 baud LAN adapter:            None                      Installed Multimedia goodies:     None                      None Installed software:     OS/2 WARP + FixPack 5     OS/2 WARP + FixPack 5                         HALITE (2/95 upgrade)     Entire BonusPak                                                   IBM TCP/IP 2.0                                                   Several shareware &                                                   freeware packages DOS 6.0, Windows 3.1     DOS 6.0, Windows 3.1 The mismatch in the colors means that colorful BMP, GIF, &.; JPEG images loaded off the Web (for example) don't look right on the home computer. But otherwise the display looks good. The low modem speed means that reflecting the controlled display back to the controlling display can take between 10 and 30 seconds. You learn to relax...

PACKAGING & DOCUMENTATION
The KopyKat package contains two complete copies of everything: two manuals, two diskettes, two registration cards. (Packages in larger multiples are available from Hilgraeve for businesses.) My first activity after cracking open the box was to read the manual (about 100 pages including front matter & index). This is an attractive volume printed in an easy-to-read typeface, laid out with plenty of white space, and many graphics showing actual displays generated by the product. It is well-organized and clearly written. I especially like how certain topics are repeated rather than simply referred to. For example, the entire section on modem settings under the heading for the controlling PC is repeated in the section for the controlled PC. No flipping back and forth when you want to look something up quickly.

I am grateful that printed documentation exists. It raised my confidence level when I did go to install the product. Later, it also let me look up a couple of things quickly without having to navigate through several levels of screens, interrupting on-screen work. I'm not knocking the online help, which appears to completely duplicate the manual with the added benefit of hyperlinks. But software houses need to recognize that humans like to study up on things sometimes in places where it's impractical to haul a PC to, like the back porch or the toilet. Hilgraeve appears to recognize this, setting a good example for others to follow.

INSTALLATION
Installation is mostly automated & easy, which is good because you have to do it twice, once on each PC. The first phase is the usual thing: insert the product diskette and execute the SETUP program on it. This downloads the software to a directory on the hard drive, modifies CONFIG.SYS (KOPYKAT library added to LIBPATH & HELP plus an added DEVICE), and adds a KopyKat folder containing two icons to the desktop. Because of the CONFIG.SYS changes, the next step is to shut down and reboot. The final phase is to execute the product.

Hilgraeve has chosen to call the controlling PC Kopy and the controlled PC Kat. That struck me as a bit cutesy at first, but after only a short time I came to realize that it is easy to remember and considerably shorter than any alternative I could come up with. Typically, I run Kopy at home and Kat at work. But the relationship is entirely symmetrical. I can run the computer at home by remote control from work. That simply requires that I start Kat at home before I leave, then call home from work by running Kopy at work.

To complete installation, just execute Kopy or Kat on each PC. The two icons in the installed desktop folder are Kopy and Kat. The first execution of either Kopy or Kat prompts for the registration number and steps through the setup steps leaving little room for errors by a relatively inexperienced user like me. I set up Kopy and Kat to communicate over modems, but there are options for using a Novell or LAN Server LAN, TCP/IP, and a null modem connector. In Kat, you have an option of setting a password that any remote user of Kopy must supply before Kat allows the remote user to connect. A password failure during connect summarily drops the phone connection. If you want to automate things as much as possible, drop a shadow of Kat in the Startup Folder and supply /A in the Parameters field of the Program page in the KAT.EXE Settings Notebook. I'll have more to say about unattended operation presently.

The whole installation on both PCs including my first successful test took about an hour. (Originally, I had both computers on my desk at work.)

USE

 * Point and click.

It's that simple. I'm a sceptic by nature but Hilgraeve's hype about KopyKat is backed by performance. The image I see on my monitor at home is identical to the one I see in my office. In fact once, I was formatting a number of diskettes at home as a background noise activity while I was running the system at work. I was puzzled by the error messages I was getting until I realized I was clicking on the Drive A icon on my work desktop. Once I remembered to switch tasks on the right desktop, I was able to continue formatting diskettes at home while browsing the Web and answering my E-mail at work.

I successfully performed the following functions by remote control:
 * Changed the Desktop Background
 * Changed Desktop palette awareness
 * Displayed the directory & file structure on the hard drive in Tree & Details Views
 * Edited & updated files with the Enhanced Editor & Tiny Editor, including CONFIG.SYS
 * Opened Icon Views of folders on the Desktop
 * Executed a native MS-DOS image viewer seamlessly from the OS/2 desktop
 * Executed Zip Control, a WPS shareware application providing a graphical frontend for ZIP
 * Executed the TCP/IP Talk application from a fullscreen OS/2 session to conduct a real-time Chat-like conversation over the LAN with a co-worker also running OS/2
 * Executed FTPPM in TCP/IP to connect via our corporate LAN &.; the Internet to our corporate mainframe, our corporate anonymous FTP server, IBM FTP servers, etc., and uploaded & downloaded files
 * Executed PMANT, an excellent 3270 Telnet function in TCP/IP, to gain LAN access to our corporate MVS mainframe and run TSO/ISPF
 * Executed LaMail, the E-mail function in TCP/IP (another wonderful package), to send & receive E-mails around the country & the world via our corporate LAN & from there out to the Internet
 * Executed WebExplorer via our corporate LAN & from there out to the Internet/World-Wide Web
 * And many more, too numerous to remember. In a word, everything I normally do at the office, I can do from home. Except send and receive FAXes, which would require another modem and data line at the office, since my only modem and data line have to be tied up communicating with Kopy at home. But I can display and manipulate FAXes received while KopyKat isn't active. I can even prepare a FAX for sending, although I won't be able to send it until I physically go to the office to turn Kat off and send the FAX.

KopyKat also provides a mechanism for transferring files between the Kopy and Kat PCs in both directions. This feature provides selectable on-the-fly compression. The only problems I encountered with this feature were with the phone connection. I use my standard residential phone line which has no special conditioning (that I know of) for data transmission. When the KopyKat file transfer function initiates, it decides if it can establish an error-free link. If it can't, it won't transfer the file or directory. When this refusal has occurred, I've zipped the data at the source and tried again with KopyKat's built-in compression disabled. This has worked every time I've tried it. But the problem appears to be temporary in the phone network because I have sent a file larger than 2Meg unzipped but had to zip much smaller files. The main point is that the files all did ultimately transfer without error.

Two other features are worth mentioning. The first is one I have not used but it sounds interesting. In the Kopy connection dialog, there is a selection for defining the connection to either control or just observe the Kat system. I can imagine the usefulness of the Observe option for training and remote support purposes (and Hilgraeve suggests other uses in their manual). I've used only the Control option.

The other is the remote boot feature. In the Kat startup dialog, there is a selection for granting permission to Kopy users to cause a reboot of the Kat system. Then, if you're allowed, just click on the Reboot selection in the Action pulldown of the Kopy system.

To take advantage of this feature, you must do everything you can to prepare the Kat system for unattended operation. Here are the things I did to my system at work. rem Following added for KopyKat 7/14/95, 8/5/95 rem These are all intended to enhance the ability of the rem system running Kat to run unattended. AUTOFAIL=YES is rem recommended by Hilgraeve in the KopyKat documentation. rem The others are all my idea. AUTOFAIL=YES SUPPRESSPOPUPS=D REIPL=ON PAUSEONERROR=NO rem ********* End of KopyKat additions ************
 * Remove the BIOS bootup password.
 * Set the Boot Manager timeout interval. I have always run with a 10-second delay on the remote chance I might want to boot up native DOS/Windows. This is a reasonably short interval so I left it alone, but disabling the timer would also be sensible. You would do that by entering the command SETBOOT /T:0 at a command prompt. Any value will work, with a shorter or longer delay during the reboot; just don't use SETBOOT /T:NO.
 * Use the Archive page of the Desktop Settings Notebook to disable both features "Create archive at each system restart" and "Display Recovery Choices at each restart." If you're there in person to make the choice, it is probably advisable to enable the Recovery Choices screen. But for unattended operation, you might as well disable it.
 * After some experience using KopyKat, I added the following lines to my CONFIG.SYS in addition to the changes made by KopyKat installation:
 * Drop a shadow of the Kat icon in the Startup folder (with the /A parameter I mentioned earlier) so the unattended system listens for your connection when any bootup completes.

After a delay, while the remote system reboots and Kat re-initializes from the Startup Folder, Kopy can reconnect. This lets you administer the Kat system, a feature with obvious great power. If you're concerned about security in a business environment, you can have OS/2 boot up to the Lockup screen, a feature you select on the first Lockup page of the Desktop Settings Notebook. Before I leave the office, I put my system at the Lockup screen and power off the monitor. Kopy connects to it without a problem. My first action at home is to enter my password, just as if I were in my office.

The resource usage of KopyKat is light. The KopyKat directory on the hard drive on each of my systems occupies about 1Meg. (The manual claims 500K.) The size fluctuates in a narrow range as the log files grow and shrink. Kopy and Kat each occupy a little under 0.5Meg in RAM while they are active. During the short time I had both PCs on my desk at work, I operated each system directly and watched how accurately the Kopy monitor mirrored the Kat monitor. Since I am using a somewhat (excruciatingly?) slow modem connection, occasionally the Kat system paused briefly if it got too many screen changes ahead of what Kopy had seen. The Kopy system did not see every screen change under these conditions, but when you are in a more realistic setting, using the Kopy keyboard &.; mouse to operate the Kat system in a remote location, you do see every change on the Kat system as if you were operating Kat locally. I expect that the delay I saw would be negligible for systems connected with decent modems (28.8Kbaud). As it was, I paid some attention to the delay between the time I clicked a mouse button in the Kopy system and the time the display started to change. This was usually just two or three seconds. The rest of the delay was purely attributable to the slow modems taking a long time to transmit a screen load of full color graphics.

PRODUCT PROBLEMS & VENDOR SUPPORT
The world isn't perfect and neither is KopyKat. Since I am using the public Cincinnati Bell telephone network for my connection, I am at the mercy of the usual line noise, which causes the phone connection to drop. After most line drops, I can simply execute the Call function of Kopy and Kat answers. I am impressed by KopyKat's smooth recovery from this frequent error.

But I am compelled to report the facts honestly and say that I am regularly able to send my work computer into a state in which Kat refuses to answer. The modems establish their link but Kat won't respond. When I arrive at the office the following day, it appears that nothing is wrong. Kat appears to be waiting for a connection in most cases. Sometimes a modem glitch has caused an error dialog to appear reporting that the modem has failed to initialize. After clicking on OK, I am always able to immediately put Kat back in answer mode. Sometimes, other processes in the system lock up for no apparent reason, something that seldom happened before I installed KopyKat. A couple of times, Kat went into an apparent loop. It wouldn't respond to any keyboard or mouse input and performing other OS/2 activity was next to impossible. My process killer freeware told me that Kat was hogging over 90% of the system and I had to kill Kat. (I would never kill a cat, though, so please, no angry letters to the editor.)

KopyKat generates history and error log files in the KOPYKAT directory. I copied these onto a diskette and sent it to Hilgraeve product support along with my registration cards. This initiated a continuing dialog via Internet E-mail with one Sam Shipley of Hilgraeve Support. Sam has been most responsive to my requests for support. It turns out that Hilgraeve is aware of problems with Kat mysteriously locking up the system or simply becoming unresponsive and I will probably get a pre-release version of the product fixes to beta test. And before I received KopyKat to review - I received it from the OS/2 SIG, not Hilgraeve - I was just another faceless unknown user.

At one point, I thought there was a conflict between KopyKat and Zip Control, a shareware package I've bought. During problem diagnosis, I put Sam in touch with the author of Zip Control, Frank Fortson of RPF Software. I was a little afraid I'd get caught in the crossfire of some furious finger-pointing. But to both of their credit, they decided to exchange software, even though the problem turned out to be a minor defect entirely within Zip Control. I think you'll agree that's first-rate product support (from both vendors, although my focus here is KopyKat.)

CONCLUSION
I can give KopyKat an enthusiastic thumbs up in two categories: product operation and vendor support. It lets me work at home a couple of days a week and still keep up with the Internet activity that is a daily part of my job, especially the files sent to our anonymous FTP server and the E-mails I exchange with my customers. My only warnings are that a 9600 baud connection is way too slow and the number of colors supported on the Kopy system should be at least as high as those on the Kat system.

If you would like to discuss any subject related to this article, feel free to contact me through the Internet at wwilly@one.net.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I gratefully acknowledge the co-operation of my boss, Jeff Gunderson, who let me borrow a PC to take home for a month, and who didn't interfere with my activities in evaluating KopyKat when he probably could have told me to get busy with other things. Thanks to my co-worker, Kathy McMahon, who loaned me the external modem I took home. Thanks to my stepson, Jeff Stone, who helped me carry the Kopy PC (a full size desktop system) in our arms perhaps half a mile from the parking garage to the demo site and back.

END OF ORIGINAL ARTICLE

LAME EXCUSES & SOB STORIES
August 18, 1995 was the deadline for submitting articles to be published in the September 1995 DOWNLOAD. On August 17, I sent Vickie a note requesting that she add the following paragraph to the article I had sent her the week before.

END OF ADDENDUM
 * Addendum: After I submitted this article to DOWNLOAD, I discovered what I believe is the cure to the problems I thought were in KopyKat. I was rummaging around the Team OS/2 web site (http://www.teamos2.org/) looking at the page of "Must Have Utilities." There is an item there called PMQSize. I thought it might deal with the problems I've described here, the problems of Kat locking up and requiring manual intervention. I've had the PMQsize package applied to my system at work for about a week now and that system has not locked up even once. I admit it's circumstantial proof but I'm confident enough to say now that the problems I was observing were never in KopyKat. Kat was merely the victim of two other processes in competition for some shared system resource and was merely being caught in the crossfire. PMQSize makes that resource less of a bottleneck and I would recommend it to anyone else who, like me, wants the Kat system to run unattended.

Vickie's response to me was, in effect, "What article?" It seems her PC had suffered some catastrophic failure during the intervening week. I gather it took her some number of weeks to get back "on the air." The only relevant point is that she no longer had my original article. Of course I immediately sent it to her again.

During that same week between my original submission and discovering Vickie had lost the article, I finally got my own PC. So for the following discussion, you can substitute a different system for the HOME PC described in my original article. The specs: Pentium 133, 32Meg RAM, 1G IDE hard drive, Sound Blaster 16 card with speakers, 4X Panasonic CD-ROM, ATI Mach 64 video adapter with 2Meg, Hayes Accura 28.8 external modem, 17" MAG Innovision monitor, GlidePoint serial mouse. And I installed WARP Connect (blue). In short, a real system, which you'll agree the demo system was not.

On September 18, after getting her PC back in operation (and after the Labor Day holiday), Vickie sent me a note saying if I could edit the article down to some smaller size and send her the revised version by September 21, she could get it into the October DOWNLOAD. That simply was not enough time for me.

In the subsequent 4 weeks, I took a week of vacation to participate in the aforementioned Jeff Stone's wedding, and I had to spend a week out of town on business. So I missed the October deadline.

Some time in October, KopyKat began misbehaving. Even though I had a proper fast modem at home by then, I was (and am) still hamstrung by the slow modem at work. On one occasion, a line lockup caused the Kat system to require an emergency reboot. The Kat system wouldn't respond to any keyboard or mouse input. All attempts to wake it up via Ctrl+Esc and even WatchCat failed. So I had to press the RESET button. Even though I had been through this before, I guess my luck finally ran out. After this event, I began noticing widespread odd damage all over my Desktop. Icons that had been there for months disappeared. I couldn't bring up WIN-OS/2. The Kat icon would be "unplugged" on every other bootup, but correct on the alternate bootups. And I discovered too late that the damage had been preserved in my Desktop Archives.

In my original article I praised Sam Shipley's responsiveness to my requests for support. At the time I wrote those comments, he was indeed responding to each of my E-mailed inquiries. But around Labor Day, he went inexplicably silent. When I started having my system problems, all my attempts to bring Sam into the loop were summarily ignored. I am most disappointed to have to inform you that I no longer think Hilgraeve's support is particularly good.

Meanwhile, I was completely unable to get Kopy and Kat to communicate at all for most of 4 months beginning in October 1995. I gave up trying some time in early November, probably after Sam had ignored about 3 or 4 of my pleas for help. I have to say that I now believe my system damage was at least partly to blame. But I could not get Hilgraeve to provide me any support at all during this time.

And I could not, in all good conscience, submit the article I had written so long before. I couldn't let such a complimentary review come out with my name on it when I was having all these problems.

Finally, in early February, one Susan Lewis at Hilgraeve sent me a message. But all she told me was that she had referred my most recent message to Sam. Who has STILL not communicated with me in what is now 11 months and counting!

Susan did give me the one piece of decent customer support I have had out of Hilgraeve in the past year. She notified me that a package of corrections to KopyKat had been posted at FTP.HILGRAEVE.COM. It turned out that just as I finally found the time (in late February 1996) to correct the damage in my work system by upgrading it from WARP (red) with Fix Pack 5 to WARP Connect (red) with Fix Pack 10, Hilgraeve posted a KopyKat patch at their FTP site. This brought KopyKat up to its current release level of 1.21.

For about a week after I reinstalled my system at work, Kopy and Kat still would not reliably connect. Then one day in early March 1996, for no reason I can identify, the problems just went away. If they had disappeared the moment I converted from WARP to WARP Connect, I could have identified that as the reason. If they had disappeared the moment I patched both Kopy and Kat up to release 1.21, I could have identified that as the reason. But after both those improvements, the problems persisted for another week before disappearing. Make your own guesses.

The months of delay did benefit this review in one unexpected way. In March 1996, I discovered that my employer had installed a node on our LAN that allows me to make a PPP connection from home using the WARP Connect Dial Other Internet Providers application. From the perspective of my system at home, my employer appears to me just like an Internet Service Provider, with the added advantage that I can get in behind our corporate firewall. As soon as I discovered that, I reconfigured Kopy and Kat to communicate using the TCP/IP option. This means that Kat communicates at the speed of our corporate LAN (56KB, I believe) while Kopy is limited by the line speed of my PPP modem connection. Despite the fact that my modem is capable of 28.8K and the modem pool into which I am dialing is allegedly made up of 28.8K modems, I rarely get connected at better than 19200. That does give me twice the speed I'd been suffering with, but it's still pretty slow. On the other hand, I can report that the TCP/IP feature of KopyKat does work quite well.

I have made one small change to improve the reliability of the unattended operation of Kat. Instead of placing a shadow of Kat in the Startup folder, as I described in my original article, I execute the following CMD file instead: E:\KOPYKAT\KAT /A /IUH /FST SETBOOT /B If there is any sort of failure in Kat, the whole system reboots. This has happened only a handful of times, but I've been quite satisfied with the results.

Today is August 8, 1996, one year to the day since I submitted my original review of KopyKat. The Kat system is now WARP Connect (red) with Fix Pack 10 and PMQSize. (I'm supposed to get a better PC at work "soon" ;-) so I haven't bothered with Fix Pack 17 there yet.) The Kopy system is now WARP Connect (blue) but I have moved up to Fix Pack 17, TCP/IP Fix Pack UN00067, and MPTS Fix Pack WR08210. I have removed PMQSize from the Kopy system, as recommended elsewhere on our Web site. Everything has reverted to working fine for about the past 5 months, so my conscience allows me to publish this review at long last.

WW

Team OS/2 & PROUD OF IT!