Prinergy down again etc Whats up with Kodak support?

[Stew]

Our prinergy keeps losing connection to the trendsetter. Kodak has worked on this many times:
At first through online support there was no problem detected with prinergy or the trendsetter - this was confirmed by a Kodak expert.

Then Kodak suggested contacting our IT person - which he said this is clearly a problem with kodak equipment and not our network.

Then kodak says it might be software problems - which kodak worked with online - didn't solve the problem.

Through all this we keep restarting prinergy to get up and going.

I complained that this is a lot of down time over many months to which a kodak tech says we should have a backup system in place. Is'nt that what a support contract is for?

When Prinergy goes is down again - restarts don't work - so now kodak decides its a prinergy hardware problem!

When prinergy was bought Kodak said problems would be solved quickly NOT SLOWLY.

Whats with the runaround? Any ideas?

 

[nemo]

Please include the type of CTP device you use and full description of the problem - there are many configurations - MPE- MCE- GMCE- all different. I advise you to keep your IT away from the box as firewall, antivirus, domain policies and certain software products may interfere with the communication. If your IT guys were so good, how come they don't have a ghost image to eliminate software configuration issues? What kind of backup strategy do they have for this box to minimize your downtime and service cost?
If it's a hardware issue, servers are under warranty from Dell or PPI and they will replace any part as long as there is a contract, but again, your IT should be able to run a diagnostic test on the hardware and figure it out...
I'm not trying to pass the blame, but from my experience, 50% of the communication problems are caused by the IT dpt itself.

 

[mattbeals]

With Prinergy I have seen problems with Norton/Symantec anti-virus and other real time file systems scanners. We ended up setting up scheduled scans that ran after the last shift.

 

[JoelAdler1]

We're having a similar problem where a Trendsetter 800III will not connect to the Prinergy server (GMCE). In addition, all the client computers cannot connect to the Prinergy server. We had this same problem back in Oct 2010 and Kodak worked remotely on the problem for about 6 hours. As the technician had exhausted all the possibilities he could think of, he decided to pick it up fresh in the morning. He asked that I reboot the server and call him in the morning. On the reboot everything made connection again. I have no idea what the fix was or whether what the technician had done prior to this was the cure. He also was at a loss. His last directive was to replace the NIC card if there was no change in condition. 9 months later we are right back to where we were. The NIC card was never changed and the system had been running flawlessly until Friday when the server shutdown and restarted on its own leaving it in its current state. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

[riky]

actually this problem of system errors is there with Prinergy, most of the time, it makes system works slower.. Try to use proxies in such situations.





Label Printing

 

[nemo]

With Trendsetter III - GMCE systems, the NIC settings are very strict - stable 1gbit/s, jumbo frames of 9000, bindings order is important and TCP ports free of interference. If you use antivirus/firewall combo always disable it on the GMCE adapter.
Some intermediate Intel drivers seem to cause unstable connections too. I recommend to use the latest one from Intel (16.3) which seems to be good:
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Det...&OSVersion=Windows Server 2003*&DownloadType=
This has nothing to do with Prinergy - it is simply a communication issue between two networking devices. The software that talks to the Trendsetter is Print Console (through a tcp port) - not Prinergy.
Check your Windows Event viewer for messages when connection drops.
Hardware support for all servers is provided by Dell. Kodak only supplies some SCSI cards and serial adapters for older Trendsetters.
Since all servers are running Windows, it is always a good idea to first reboot the system and ask your IT to create backup images periodically.

 

[JoelAdler1]

Thank you for your responses. Greatly appreciated especially on a holiday weekend.
For 4 years we haven't had a true IT person. Lack of maintenance could be our issue. We purposely have not updated the operating system at any point for fear of disrupting what has worked so well. So from what you are saying Kodak will probably not have an answer. We're going to need a good IT person familiar with this box. Does anyone know of such a person in the Metropolitan NY area? Thanks again for all your input!

 

[mattbeals]

Unfortunately I'm on the opposite side of the country or I'd come over. I suppose at some point we could try and do a phone call and go through a few things. Can you log into the box at all or is it completely down?

 

[JoelAdler1]

Our server (Poweredge 2900) is up and running Windows Server 2003. The administrator is up and running as well. There is a message that pops up saying that a process couldn't load. This message has been appearing for well over a year with no noticeable problem. Currently the led on the front of the computer reads the following message: E1614 PS 1 Status E161C PS 1 Input Lost E1624 PS Redundancy. I believe this is referring to our UPS. As far as I can see, it has been running fine.

 

[mattbeals]

So you have a bad/faulty power supply or a power source is unavailable for that power supply. There is probably more going on. Are there any other flashing lights on the front? You may have to take the front bezel off to see. A failed drive in the RAID (assuming they set you up with a RAID) can also cause problems.

 

[nemo]

Make sure both power cables are plugged in.

 

[Stew]

Many months later prinergy techs had the board with the nic card replaced. So far so good.