Troubleshooting

The Terminal Recovery Procedure is designed to get your POS terminal network operating again as quickly as possible. It is a temporary measure for continuing trade until time can be spent investigating the problem more closely.

If your master terminal will be offline for a long period of time (eg. for repairs or to be replaced) you should follow the steps below for Assigning a New Master Terminal.

If your master terminal fails, other terminals in the same POS area will be unable to run the RedCat program until they are restarted. The program will most likely freeze and need to be shut down manually.

When a terminal freezes there are two immediate possibilities:

•If this is a slave terminal, an error has occurred either directly on this terminal or on the master terminal

•If this is the master terminal, an error has occurred directly on this terminal

Check the status of the master terminal straight away:

•If the master terminal is functioning correctly, restart this slave terminal. If it does not function correctly, shut it down.

•If the master terminal is frozen, close RedCat on all other terminals first and shut them down, then restart the master terminal.  If it still does not function correctly, shut it down.

•Turn on the Back Up terminal; that is the #2 terminal in the POS Network hierarchy (see section POS Terminal Redundancy and Recovery).

•Open RedCat on this terminal. When it cannot ‘find’ the Master terminal on the network the following message will be displayed:

•Click OK and the following message will be displayed:

•Press Yes and enter password

Now turn on other terminals on the network and log them into RedCat. They will recognise the temporary master as the new master terminal. The terminal which was #3 in the POS Hardware hierarchy will now become the Back Up terminal.

While the master terminal is offline, the above process will need to be followed each time the till software is opened on the temporary master. Therefore, if the problem on the master terminal cannot be rectified straight away, or it is sent away for repairs, consider assigning a new Master terminal within the back-of-house (see section POS Area Details).

Note: The temporary master will inherit all of the hardware and system settings that are usually resident on the master terminal. For example, if a local (serial) printer is usually plugged into COM port 2 on the master terminal, it can be moved onto COM 2 of the temporary master to function the same way.

Once the master has been repaired you can re-assign a temporary master to a slave again and re-instate the permanent master by following these steps:

1.Before turning on the master terminal, re-attach any peripherals which were moved while the master was down.  e.g. receipt printers;

2.Close Redcat on all terminals;

3.Turn on the repaired master terminal;

4.Start Redcat on the master terminal;

5.Start Redcat on the slave terminals.

If you have re-assigned a slave terminal as a permanent master, you can reassign the master terminal at the BOH by editing area settings in POS Locations (see section POS Area Details).

Other Notes:

•Heat may affect your network. Cat5e (blue) data cables will deteriorate over time and changes in weather or temperature may intensify the effect. Loose or damaged points will cause instability across your network.

•Plugging cables into wrong ports may cause failures to your router, network switch or POS terminal. Use caution when reattaching cables.

•Your POS system terminals are computers, they will respond to viruses and misuse like all other computers.

•When cleaning touch screens unsure the terminal is switched off. Rubbing wet cloths all over the screen when the unit is on may cause the terminal to freeze. Remember a touch screen is a virtual keyboard jamming all the keys at once will cause inconsistent responses.

•WARNING - Shutting off power to your terminal using an incorrect procedure may cause Hard Drive corruption