ALOHA POS - terminals not seeing server

[AlexiD12]

Came in this morning and terminals were looking for fireserver, which happens once in a while, and quick reboot of the server fixes the problem.
Today, this wasnt the case. The problem persisted. I shutdown all the terminals, and server, powered down the switch, router, etc. Fired them up one at a time which has fixed the problem in the past. Nothing.

When I go to the network on my server, I cannot gain access to any of the terminals. The fileserver can see my personal computer and a media player on the network, but not the POS terminals. All computers and terminals are on the IBERTECH network as always.

I started getting busy and was forced to put the terminals in redundancy mode. They could all see each other, but not the fileserver. The cables appear to be fine as the fileserver has internet access and can see all other computers on the network, except for the terminals. And all the terminals work fine in redundancy mode so I assume their cabling is functional.

Nothing was changed since last night when everything was working fine. Any thoughts?

 

[coorsman]

Had a call similar to this today. Seems as though the windows update turned on the firewall on the server. I would check that first.

 

[tsl757]

There are four things you can check
1. That the back office server is PHYSICALLY connected to the switch.Can you ping any of your terminals?
2. That the ip address scheme of terminal is the same as Aloha server. this could have changed if you have dhcp turned on on server, and your router/modems ip address changed.
3. The physical name of the back office PC is different from yesterday.
4. Lastly CTLSVR service should be running on the back office server.

 

[AlexiD12]

I caved and called the help desk for a ridiculous fee. I was on the phone for over an hour. Turns out when the system was setup 3 years ago, all Ethernet cables were going to the same switch. The tech told me it would never work like that, I advised him it HAD been working like that for over 3 years and suddenly it didn't.

Ultimately, we have everything running out of a single NIC, with the two different subnets listed. I know this isnt exactly the safest method in terms of security, but I'll go get a small switch and separate the ALOHA terminals.

 

[tsl757]

I have the same setup in my lab system. But I have two NICs on the SERVER. One for the ALOHA network with static IP info and the other one with DHCP turned on so I can connect to the LAN printers and fileservers. Another thing we try when we loose connection is to restart the switch, even move the cable to a different port onthe switch.