Today I came into the lab and noticed that the Thermo Pathfinder was not showing the correct mag or stage positions on our FEI Quanta instrument. So of course I re-started Pathfinder because if someone had re-started the FEI software while the Thermo software was running, it will break the DCOM connection. But when the Thermo Pathfinder re-started I got the error "Failed to Connect" and then "Connection Not made".
Now you might ask, why am I posting this in the PictureSnapApp board? Well, mostly because there is no FEI board on this forum, but also because when I start PictureSnapApp I also get the error "Permission Denied", so it seems the DCOM connection is now broken in general for all apps.
So I re-started the Quanta computer and software, but still no dice. I can ping the Quanta microscope computer at 192.168.0.1 from the Thermp?PSA computer fine, but both PictureSnapApp and Pathfinder refuse to connect to the FEI computer over the local 192.168.0.1 connection.
I should probably also re-start the Thermo/PSA computer but it's in the middle of a Monte Carlo calculation for a paper and I hate to interrupt it. Maybe tomorrow.
In the meantime, does anyone have any suggestions as to why the DCOM connection is suddenly broken, but the user logins for both computers are still the same?
Just an update on the DCOM wars on our FEI Quanta Win 2000 computer...
We finally got the DCOM connection working again, but to be honest we really aren't exactly sure how it happened or what we did to fix the problem! Yup, not very satisfying, but here's our best guess now that the smoke has cleared:
To begin with we think that the issue started when we temporarily connected the Quanta MPC to the Internet to allow the Norton Ghost software to renew it's subscription. Norton had been complaining that our license had expired so I thought, what's the harm in connecting an Internet cable to the PC? I'll just change the IP address from static private to a dynamic address on the campus network, then restore the 192.168.0.1 static address afterwards. And we were able to renew the Ghost subscription and then I reset the connection back to it's original values, and was able to ping the computer through the 192.168.0.x subnet afterwards so all seemed fine network wise.
But apparently something was not happy and the DCOM would not connect even though we went through all the many steps provided to us by Thermo and FEI support. We then decided to try and get a duplicate hard disk we had made a few years ago, but for some other reason every time we tried to boot it up, it would get to the Windows 2000 logo and then blue screen.
Our instrument engineer tried everything he could think of but still no dice. So then we called in the campus IT people to try and help us get the duplicate disk bootable, and so I demonstrated the DCOM problem on the original working disk, and lo and behold, the DCOM connections all worked perfectly!
The only thing we can think of is that somehow in the process of trying to re-boot the computer with a different disk and having to go into the ROM settings we somehow got the network card working properly again. But who knows?
Jeez, what a pain, but PictureSnapApp and Thermo Pathfinder all seem happy now connecting to the Xt software on the Quanta MPC. I just hope this never happens to anyone else!