Troubleshooting Gsite Connection

The product we use to connect to the GSite is NOT OUR PRODUCT but is produced by Gilbarco and/or your PC manufacturer and so NO back office company can connect if we cannot. The issue is therefore in potentially the following areas:

1) The GSite itself and the I/O board is very often bad, and sometimes even replacement boards are bad.

2) The cable and connector to the PC is bad or too long or has connections in the cable. The cable MUST be less than 100 feet and as straight as possible with no kinks etc in it and MUST not run over or close to florescent lights and NO JOINTS of any type. The cable MUST be one that is purchased with RJ45's on both ends and NOT be a switch over cable but straight thru. I cannot tell you how many times we get people making these cables for the user and swears they are tested good and we find that the cable is actually wired wrong.

3) The connector on the serial card on the PC MUST BE GSITE original and tested, some of these connectors we have recevied have been faulty

4) The serial board on the PC is often setup incorrectly with bad drivers as nowadays these serial ports are NOT supplied by the PC and drivers do often get installed incorrectly by the person putting them in. We normally uninstall the drivers and reinstall and that often helps.

The solution is simple, we need to define where the problem is, the ONLY way to test this when we have this serious of an issue to get the GSite tech to connect to the GSITE using the same cable and FTP connection or using GFTP connection. The issue here is that the tech will often connect and test via a different port on the GSite and his test will show fine, as he is NOT using the same RPCI port as we are, and often do not use the same connectors and cable that we have connected to the PC. Most techs are not very familiar nor very comfortable testing the same system and same program that we use, SO you must get him to connect using FTP with the SAME connection and SAME wire and only a simple FTP via FTP or gossip using GFTP. If he is not familiar with this method of testing then he is not the one for this job.

To connect to the GSite there are two methods available to the Tech one is using the Gossip level 1 and GFTP and the other is FTP using true FTP connection via the serial port. We can communicate by either method but I highly doubt if you tech actually did what I am requesting.

ON very few GSites there are settings on the GSite that have to be configured to allow us to communicate but again this is a GSite tech's job to make certain these settings are correct as HE IS THE GSITE tech not US. AGAIN PLS REMEMBER THE CONNECTION FROM YOUR PC TO THE GSITE DOES NOT USE ANY S2K SOFTWARE FOR TESTING PURPOSES. So to say this is an S2k issue means whoever says that has no idea what they are talking about. It could easily be the PC issue as well, and so is NOT confined to the GSite but the above should isolate the issue.

Now once the above is done and confirmed yes all is working to the gsite as described above and when we use the same program on your PC and we still cannot connect there are now two remaining issues:

1) A bad serial port even though it says it is working, the drivers might still be bad
2) Some firewall you have installed is stopping this as we use FTP connection and many firewalls do stop this type of connection, however we did not see that on