Aloha and MS Server 2003

[jimmywash]

Is anyone here running an Aloha network with this configuration?

The store I'm running has 10 terminals and we are having sever problems with stability. We have a support company telling us that we need another terminal running server 03 in the network. This makes no sense to me. Anyone have advise?

 

[bigblok403]

If it is to fix a CAL (License) issue, than there is truth to this. Inserting a 2003 server terminal will increase the amount of terminals allowed to communicate together.

Example - If all 10 terminals were running Windows XPe with EDC, and one of these is the master, you would not have enough licenses to operate correctly. Inserting a 2003 server terminal to operate as the master terminal with more licenses would fix this problem

 

[jimmywash]

So there is a limit to the number of licenses you can run on each server?

And yes, that is the setup.....all 10 are XPe with EDC on each term.

 

[zahead31]

We have the same issue. We run with 12 terminals in the FOH, all running EDC. When we opened our newest restaurant, we purchased 4 copies of Windows 2000 server. We decided to have 4 terminals with the ability to become the master, which is a bit more money, but makes our system more redundant.

The other solution is to upgrade to Aloha v6, which is supposed to solve the licensing issue without upgrading your OS. We are about to test this in our location. I will let you know how it goes.

 

[jimmywash]

Yeah, we have also been advised to upgrade to v6 to resolve the issue now. We are going to try and knock this out tomorrow....will update the tread with any info.

 

[Circle9]

On Windows XP Pro, the limit of computers that can be connected to a workgroup is 10.

 

[jimmywash]

Update:

So we upgraded to V6 Aloha and are still experiencing major issues. Our latest problem is corrupt translogs.

We even changed our server to an xp box. So now we have 10 terms running aloha 6 with an xp box. Every terminal has voltage regs with ground guards and every terminal is hard wired to a brand new switch.

All this new equipment and we are still crashing. Anyone have any suggestions????

 

[zahead31]

When our site upgraded to v6, we had about half our terminals looking at one master terminal, and the the others looking ta a different master. You can determine this by opening the Downtime.ini file and looking at the LASTMASTERID. I was told by our reseller that this could cause a corrupt trans log.

Refreshing the system did not fix the issue. What I ended up doing was deleting the Downtime.ini from every terminal and manually shut every terminal down. Then I brought up the terminally to be the Master. Once that was up, I powered on the remaining terminals. Every terminal came up and was pointing to the same master terminal.

Hope this helps,
Matt

 

[posknowitall]

Which version of Aloha 6 are you running?

 

[zahead31]

posknowitall-

You may not be asking me, but I am going to throw it out there anyway! We are running v6.1.9

 

[alohaakamai3]

Is the ability to MASTERCAPABLE and SERVERCAPABLE set to false on all but the terminals designated to be master?

I am assuming this is the case, but on larger sites, even when connections are not an issue, we only allow a handful of computers to be master or server capable. I think it had something to do with Aloha terminals constantly scanning the network for the master to see if they needed to become the master. And turning this off on most of them fixed some of the strange things your experiencing, and on more than one occasion.

Just a thought.

 

[posknowitall]

Thanks, Zahead31
I am getting ready to dig my hands into 6.x and just wondering what to look out for. Chronic corrupt trans.logs are a worry. I am not dealing with sites that large, however.

 

[zahead31]

No problem, posknowitall

I may have actually spoke too soon! I noticed this morning our terminals were pointing to two differnt Master terminals this morning. I went through my steps listed above to correct. So, it appears this fix is working for the day, but the problem reappears when the terms refresh at EOD.

I am going to try out the RFS feature tomorrow morning (get my XP terminals running as master!). I hear this feature works well - my dealer tells me they have an all XP setup running with 18 terminals using this feature.

 

[posknowitall]

Zahead31
RFS feature--what is this? Have you considered trying a newer version?

 

[zahead31]

Maintenance->Store Settings->System Group

There is a tab labeled RFS. This is supposed to be workaround for the Windows 2000 & XP licensing issue. I am not sure exactly how it works, but it looks like it starts a service on the fileserver that handles all connections between the terminals.

 

[zahead31]

The version we run is usually dictated by our reseller. They will give us the version that they are most comfortable with. Right now, it appears that they are installing 6.1.9 in all their locations (received a letter from them stating to be CISP compliant, they want all their customers on 6.1.9).

I am thinking they may not have tested 6.1.12 yet, but do you think I should request to be upgraded to that version? From reading some of the posts here (and from my experience), it seems that 6.1.9 is pretty buggy.

Thanks for your help,
Matt

 

[alohaakamai3]

To the best of my knowledge, 5.3.15 is the CISP compliant version of Aloha. Someone correct me if this was changed.

There may be something in that version that makes it easier for your dealer to support-then again, it may be a way for them simply to get more money out you.

Refusing to support versions that are 4 or 5 years old is one thing. Demanding that you be on the most recent version of the software (or darn close to it) seems a little extreme (unless this is a new installation).