Radiant/Aloha remote printer problem

[newbie09]

Hi all,

After being in use for over one year, our system has had a malfunction. We are running Aloha TS on Radiant Systems touch screen POS terminals with a PC in the main office.

We have three printers, two being local printers, one each at our two POS terminals and a remote printer in the kitchen.

At the end of business yesterday everything worked fine but earlier today, things went awry.

The error message on the POS screen read “remote printer 1 is offline”.

Apparently, when this initially occurred, tickets would print incomplete and turning the printer on and off would complete the ticket. Later this stopped helping.

Subsequent re-boot of the system did not help.

Moving the printer and substituting it for one of the local printers showed that it would print without a problem as a local printer.

As I have another open jack to plug the network cable into, I tried that also; same error msg.

I cleared the content of the only print log that was over 40K and saveas (PRT1.LOG); same error msg

When I ran a self test from the printer, this is what came out:

Serial Interface
Baud rate :9600 bps
Data bits :8 bits
Parity :even
Stop bit :1 bit or more
Handshaking :XON/XOFF
Receive error rints '?'

I tried re-routing back to remote 1 after each of these steps and testing it but got the error message each time.

What am I missing?
Thanks for any help!

 

[newbie09]

It's a wiring problem.
Don't know what went wrong with two of the wall jacks but went to basement to inspect wiring, found no visible damage but three CAT5 cables, including the two offenders were laying across hot water pipes.

 

[newbie09]

Tried moving the printer to be directly connected to com port 5 on Term 1 and still no luck.
Tried a different cable from the adapter to the printer still no luck.
Will get a new adapter (for in between the com port and the cable) today.

 

[newbie09]

Adapter (female RJ-45 to male RJ-11/12) isn't easily available. Found a spare one dangling off T2. Moved adapter to T1. No luck.

Moved adapter, cable and printer to T2; moved remote 1 to com5 on T2 in BOH. Much luck! Workaround found.

How do I determine if the com port has physically failed or if there's a setting that's screwed itself up out of the blue?

Many thanks.

 

[alohatech2]

The com port settings are in the bios. I would hit the bios of T2 and compare the settings on that com port to the ones on T1. If they are the same, com port failed.

Otherwise, there are diagnostic tests you can search for and download. We haven't used them so I can't tell you much more, but our hardware repair vendor does so I know they exist.

 

[newbie09]

Thanks for your help alohatech2.