If one of your Witango services is crashed or hung, you'll see an intermittent issue like this. See if restarting everything corrects the problem (at least for a while). Write a utility that will check to see that each service is properly running.
-----Original Message----- From: Wolf, Gene [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 3:11 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Witango-Talk: Strange problem OK, I'm at the end of my rope and I thought a few more eyes looking at this might be able to give me some ideas as to where to look. We have Windows Professional using a SQL database. For the last 9 months everything has been working smoothly. Suddenly 3 weeks ago we started getting reports that some people, sporadically, could not use the electronic Timecard system written in Witango. Now, this system has been working fine for over 9 months. The first reports we chalked up to user error because after retrying the user was able to make it work. However, the reports continued to come in and grew more frequent. I can now replicate the error on my system though it is not consistent. What I mean by that is, if I try long enough I can make the error happen, but sometimes it takes quite a while to happen, and other times it'll happen right away. What we're seeing in the generic page that indicates, This page cannot be displayed, as though we are pointing to an invalid server address. Almost as though there is a DNS error. The other error we see is a totally blank page. The error page is the most common but blank page results do happen as well. Our location is split between 2 facilities separated by about 6 miles. Witango runs on one server, the SQL database runs on another server. Both servers are up to date, have no virus issues, and have been running this software for the last several months flawlessly. We recently upgraded to Witango Professional but it was running for several weeks, without issue, so we assume this is not the problem. I've copied all of the facts we know below from an e-mail I sent to my management and networking folks this morning with some additions for folks not familiar with our server names. If anyone has any ideas to pursue please shoot them my way. I'm totally stumped by this one! ************** memo sent ************************** OK, I've done everything I know and we still have problems with the timecard system. Here are the issues: 1. It's not dead. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Most of the time it does. 2. Some people it hardly ever works for, Marty Jennings for example. 3. Some people it never fails for, Greg Mcelhinny for example. 4. For some people it does not work for, on their personal machine, we can bring up their card and it works fine. 5. Most of the problems seem to be in Melbourne, not Palm Bay, although we have problems here too. 6. I have turned on debugging and the program seems to be doing just what it is supposed to be doing. 7. When it fails we get either Page cannot be found (like it's looking at an invalid IP address) or a blank screen. 8. The program never fails under Opera or Netscape 9. It seems to be only an issue with the Timecard system, nothing else. All other Witango programs are behaving normally. 10. We have updated Alabama with all critical patches as of yesterday. The problem still exists. 11. I have searched the Microsoft Knowledge base and nothing seems to relate to us with this problem. 12. On some systems, like my own desktop machine, the problem is sporadic. Sometimes it will fail, sometimes not. What I'd like to try to do, if possible, is to trace what Alabama (Witango Server) is trying to access network wise. I'm sure it is not a network issue, but I need to know what Alabama is trying to access in those cases it is displaying the "Page cannot be Displayed" message. At the point that message is displayed my program is out of the loop and there's nothing I can do to determine where it is going. I have traced the program to the end in the cases it fails and it looks like the timecard should be displayed. It isn't. I'm wondering if the Witango server is generating a bad header record that IIS is not handling properly, or whether the browser is not handling properly. Clay, do you have any kind of network sniffing tool that we can use to look to see just what Alabama is sending out to the network, where it's trying to go, so we can see what it's trying to do? Other than that, I'm at a loss for what to do in order to fix this problem. All suggestions are welcomed! Gene Wolf Business Systems Analyst, TLMN DRS Optronics, Inc. 2330 Commerce Park Drive Palm Bay, Florida 32905 Phone: 321-309-0685 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Go to http://www.witango.com/maillist.taf ________________________________________________________________________ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Go to http://www.witango.com/maillist.taf
