When you get the error message “A network error occurred while communicating with connection manager. Please try again later" while opening the data file hosted by another computer, it is most likely related to firewall and security software between the client PC and the server PC.
In today’s blog post, we are going to share with you of how to use the command line “telnet” to confirm the port connectivity between the 2 computers.
Before you use the telnet command in the client PC, you will need to first get the IP address of the server PC. You can get this information by going to the server PC, open a run box by pressing the window key + R, open an MS-DOS command prompt by typing CMD and press enter. Then, in the command prompt, key in ipconfig and you will get the IP address. An example of an IPV4 address is 192.168.1.1.
After getting the IP address of the server, open the command prompt in the client PC. Then, key in the following command:
- telnet 192.168.1.1 13531
Telnet is the actual command we are going to use, followed by the IP address of the server PC, which is 192.168.1.1 in our example, with the number 13531, which is the port used by Sage 50 Connection manager.
If you see a blank cursor, then the connection is doing fine and you will have to troubleshoot more to dig out the cause of the connection difficulty. If you see a line saying “Connecting to 192.168.1.1…… Could not open connection to the host, on port 13531: Connect failed”. The connectivity of the port between the client and the server PC is blocked, and it is usually related to firewall. In this case, you will have to open the port of the firewall for incoming traffic of the server and/or outgoing traffic of the client.
For your information, if you get the message “telnet is not recognized as an internal or external command”, it means the telnet client feature is not turned on in your client PC. If you are using windows 7 or up, you can go to Control Panel, Programs and Features. Then, Click Turn Windows features on or off on the left hand side and put a check mark to Telnet Client.
On our upcoming blog post, we will talk about how to open the port in windows firewall. Have a wonderful week and stay tuned.