Aloha EDC persistently going into Spool down.

[RogueTech]

I have an system that keeps randomly going into Spool down for some unknown reason. I get called and have to remote in, locate the transactions and push them through EDC. I cannot figure out why and am pretty much just guessing on a few different things. The site recently increased their bandwidth from ISP and the site is running on multiple network devices. Also they are on a old 5.2 version and refuse to go to the reseller for upgrade.

Thanks in advance,

-RT

 

[OhThatComputerGuy]

You need to check the EDC path on the terminals in the ibercfg.bat. It should be pointed to the fileserver\bootdrv\edc, etc.

 

[360fish]

one scenario:
Going into frequent spooldown can indicate a problem with network configuration and infrastructure, not recovering from spooldown sometimes indicates a problem with permissions / rights.


1) Permissions - do all the terms have full read/write access to the file server and vice versa? specifically does the user account the CTRSVR and EDCSVR services are registered under have read/write access to the shares on the FOH computers? if EDC's service is registered as local system you should register it as a user with ... read write the the FOH.

2) Networking - lots of switches = bad especially for older versions of Aloha. Doubly true if as often is the case lots of switches means you also have lots of bad wiring. Try to at least get them onto one switch and make sure it's a new switch, they're cheap, don't just reuse an old one. Check wiring that it's not going over florescent light fixtures and the like... Make sure all NICs on FOH and BOH have power saving turned off... make sure only Aloha stuff is on the network, things of that nature.

just some ideas.

 

[eburks]

My vote here is that you have an internet problem

One way to check that is:

setup their internet router to accept and reply to pings

get a free account at

http://www.pingdom.com

and set it up to ping your external Ip address at that location every 60 seconds. It will at least let you rule out internet problems.

here is an example of what you can do

http://stats.pingdom.com/2j5qdwh3l8le

click on the title for a minute by minute graph

We had 2 weeks of problems with new Comcast Service (phones and internet)
I setup the pingdom to show them our outages and after a full week of level2 troubleshooting they located a relay 2 miles down the street that was the problem

also....
I replaced an old school linksys 5 port/wirelessG router with a new wireless N netgear router last week and people immediately started having trouble maintaining wireless connections on their laptops. Went back to the linksys and problem went away so don't rule out problems with new equipment

 

[coorsman]

For the spooled transactions to automatically process from the master terminal the EDC service must be set to log on with the same username and password as the terminals. But if there is no internet connection or backup dial up then all txn's will not be processed and error out loosing transactions in the process.

As far as loosing connection to the internet, make sure the NIC card isn't set to sleep. I'm told it wont wake on EDC transactions. Check windows event logs and debout.edc for telltail signs of errors. Use a backup dial out modem if possible.




Cheers,
Coorsman

 

[360fish]

let us know if you fix it, and the solution? I'm with coorsman on this it's likely user/service/permissions - your edc service needs to be running as the same user the FOH is using to log in with and that user needs full read/write permissions on the folder *and* share on the BOH. And make sure all your nics are not sleeping and then you can think about internet or other things.

 

[TheMagicJBone]

The EDC service doesn't need to be running as the same user as the terminals, it just needs to be running with credentials that have read/write permissions to the terminals' bootdrv shares. Otherwise individual terminal accounts would lock you down to a single master terminal; if another took over (with a different account) EDC would fail.

J