Hi Rob Daniels. Thanks for contacting Sage.

One potential cause of this issue is if your local or server PC times are not set correctly (i.e., PC clock is out of sync). Can you please verify if the local and server clocks are set correctly and in sync?

The other Sage City issue you referenced was caused due to usage of mapped drive and was resolved by using a UNC path to the datasets on the server. Not sure if this is the same for you, but worth checking that too please.

Was it restarting only the client machines that resolved the issue, or did you need to restart the server machines too?

Hope this helps.

Thanks.

Hi Ali, yes the time is set correctly and the local clock is in sync with the server clock.

I've checked for mapped drives and that's not it, we're using UNC paths in the company file and throughout sage.ini. The company selection screen also shows a UNC path.

It's only restarting the client machines that's needed, never the server, but the client machines might take several restarts before they can reconnect.

Thanks

Rob

Thanks for the info Rob.

Can you please check the time is in sync with the server clock when you see the issue again on one of the clients? I'm just wondering if the client clock is getting out of sync somehow and then a restart is correcting that automatically.

Have you got any third party Antivirus software installed on the client machine?

Thanks.

Will do.

We've had 3 that won't connect this morning (too late for the clock check I'm afraid).

On the first one I cleared the DNS cache and the .NET folder, then restarted twice before Sage started to connect normally.

On the second, Sage connected after clearing the DNS cache and the .NET folder.

I cleared the DNS cache and .NET folder on the third one but still needed 1 restart before Sage connected.

During this time, 3 other computers were using Sage as normal. I already uninstalled or Antivirus from one of them as a test.

Thanks

Hi Ali

This morning we've had 3 computers unable to access Sage data, different 3 to yesterday. All 3 local clocks matched the server perfectly. One of these 3 was the one I uninstalled Antivirus so it seems that's not it either.

It's beginning to look like clearing the DNS cache might be the quick fix, I restarted the first one before I flushed DNS but it worked OK on it's own for the second and third.

What would be the permanent fix for this?

Thanks

Possible workaround

Since it looks like this might be a DNS issue, I've added the company to the list for a second time but using the IP address instead of the server name. it doesn't fix the cause but so far it allows us to get some work done:

As you can see here even when the current problem is preventing us from connecting using the server name, the company that uses the IP address is still able to establish the data version and subsequently connects as normal.

Thanks a lot for the extra information Rob, appreciate it.

Looks like for some reason the client is not resolving machine names to their IP address.

Can I please ask you to add the following system environment variable to a client PC that has the issue when using machine names in the path and see if that resolves it. We explicitly set that flag on the app so it should be getting automatically picked up, but I think it's worth manually adding it as an environment variable to see if it makes a difference

Add GRPC_DNS_RESOLVER variable name and set its value to "native" (without the quotes)

Quick Update

No further issues noted since the environment variable was added to each PC a little over 2 weeks ago. Looks like this is resolved, Thanks Ali

Rob

Is this added as a User or System environment variable?

Hi Stephen. It would be system environment variables. In practice you shouldn't need to add this variable as the Sage 50 service adds it automatically, but there appears to be instances as in Rob's case where that's not having an effect. Possibly related to specific system environment/setup. I will investigate further to see if I can replicate it, but in the meantime the above workaround can be used. Hope that helps. Thanks.