Fed Up With Allen Bradley and Rockwell

[mainstreetmark]

Today, the "Test Application" resulted in some error about writing tag databases. Shortly after, FTView itself crashed. After the crash, my HMI project was completely broken. The .mer on the HMI was 2 days old, and i hadn't used the horrible "Application Manager" to make a backup in also about 2 days. How I wish I could "File->Save As..." so I could easily save my work as I went along.

Time to start over!

(no, rebooting didn't fix it. no, the "test application" file is not a .mer, and therefore not recoverable. no, I'm not happy)

 

[turtletrax]

Out of ideas

I stumbled across this thread in hopes to find an answer to my Rockwell problem. Any ideas would be great appreciated as I have used up all of mine! We started having problems at one of the plants with the Rockwell software opening. Generally it freezes at about 43% of it loading. If it does almost load, it freezes with "Flows" trying to load at the bottom. (sorry if I don't know more specific terminology but I don't use the software, I was just called in to try and help) What we discovered was if we remove the gateway IP from the PC, Rockwell loads. In order to eliminate the network as being a problem, we have tried a new switch, new router, and multiple physical routes out to the Internet. As soon as we put the gateway back in, Rockwell won't load, or will freeze up if it is already running.

Not being familiar with how Rockwell operates, I'm not sure if there are IP Settings for the software or not.

I'm hoping someone will say "oh I know what that is, you need to do this!", but ANY suggestions are welcome. Again, sorry for my lack of knowledge on the software. Thanks

 

[turtletrax]

I stumbled across this thread in hopes to find an answer to my Rockwell problem. Any ideas would be great appreciated as I have used up all of mine! We started having problems at one of the plants with the Rockwell software opening. Generally it freezes at about 43% of it loading. If it does almost load, it freezes with "Flows" trying to load at the bottom. (sorry if I don't know more specific terminology but I don't use the software, I was just called in to try and help) What we discovered was if we remove the gateway IP from the PC, Rockwell loads. In order to eliminate the network as being a problem, we have tried a new switch, new router, and multiple physical routes out to the Internet. As soon as we put the gateway back in, Rockwell won't load, or will freeze up if it is already running.

Not being familiar with how Rockwell operates, I'm not sure if there are IP Settings for the software or not.

I'm hoping someone will say "oh I know what that is, you need to do this!", but ANY suggestions are welcome. Again, sorry for my lack of knowledge on the software. Thanks

 

[diat150]

it might help if you list the software you are having issues with.

I have a similar issue with factorytalk view studio. I guess it tries to go out and connect to the devices listed in rslinx enterprise if i am plugged into a network. I usually just unplug from the network before I crank up the software and that makes it load instantly.

 

[turtletrax]

Sorry, its the RSView program. If I remove the gateway the program will start, but then if I add the gateway back in, it locks up again.

 

[ruby.n]

I use these programs regularly and have never faced any such problems...

 

[TimothyMoulder]

I prefer Siemens for HMI when allowed by customer to choose. Their WinCC Flexible software is the best HMI programming software I've ever used. The touchscreens and keypad units are great hardware. We use Siemens HMI on Siemens, GE, and Allen-Bradley PLC's. For AB it will not talk Ethernet to the SLC family but it will to CompactLogix.

You may wanna rethink that...

 

[rdrast]

Sorry, its the RSView program. If I remove the gateway the program will start, but then if I add the gateway back in, it locks up again.

Get a copy of Wireshark, and see what it is trying to talk to.

Having a problem with a gateway address plugged in generally means that for whatever reason, the software is trying to find something not on your LAN.

Another possibility (which is difficult to determine from the insufficient details) is that some machine(s) or device(s) may have received a corrupted DHCP/BOOTP address, or a firewall problem may be showing up due to an update.

Really, for actual consideration of your situation, you should START A NEW THREAD.

 

[turtletrax]

We've used these same PC's and software for years with no problems like this either. It started out of the blue one day.

 

[turtletrax]

We did actually run Wireshark already and it didn't show anything that helped up pinpoint the problem.

I have wondered if there were some type of updates to Windows that caused the problem. We did uninstall the latest updates, but I'm wondering if we shouldn't just start with a new PC and reload everything.

 

[Lawfish]

I fee your pain and have felt the same way for a long time. Do what we did, send RS an invoice for your time. If you are going to do this, be sure to document all correspondence with tech support. That seems to at least get the ball rolling. It worked for us. I know a lot people in our industry that are totally fed up. Good luck!

 

[Lawfish]

I have also noticed that Linx Enterprise and Linx Classic sometimes fight and lock each other up. I would recommend not running them at the same time (i.e. don't run Linx Classic as a service).

 

[turtletrax]

Thanks, we called tech support one time and they were a waste of time. They couldn't get us off the phone fast enough and just kept saying it was a network issue. There have been 3 of us working on this problem consistently for about 3 weeks now. We even had a network engineer come to town to make sure it wasn't a network component (router/switch) causing the problem.

 

[Honga]

On the note of the original intent of the thread, I work in marketing at RA, for all the on tour events and training (and even personally) we use virtual machines, it's clean, risk free, easy to backup, and somewhat fast!

 

[Operaghost]

Turtletrax,

Perhaps you would be best off starting a new thread asking your question. Most of us see this old thread and just ignore it. I think you'll get more help with a new thread. Glomming onto an unrelated thread won't get you the right people reading your issue.

Just a thought....

OG