Tharstern Dongle - a long shot I know

[sparkplug]

OK, this has been driving me crazy.

First a little background:

The company I work for had a license for Tharstern. They went into administration and were bought out by 'newco'
'newco' have just bought shuttleworth so we don't have any technical support for Tharstern.

We also have a bunch of shiny new workstations for people to use - hurrah!

As there will be a period of time when the estimators will need to be able to view old quotes from the Tharstern system, I've configured the new workstations to work with Tharstern and all is hunky dory and wonderful.

EXCEPT for one laptop (the only laptop, don't know if that makes a difference)

I've configured the ODBC Data source for the SQL server and done the tests and everything is how it should be.

However, when I try to connect to Tharstern I get the following error "unable to find a dongle"

The dongle is present, and is working for all other workstations.
I've tried disconnecting all other workstations to make sure it's not due to too many licenses in use at once.
I've even done a complete reinstall of windows on the laptop in desperation only to arrive at exactly the same problem.

Does anyone have any suggestions? (I know it's a very very very long shot - but I'm always amazed at the range of knowledge here )

Cheers

 

[judge]

Reckon you're missing a driver for the dongle - had a similar thing with an Architects's dongle licensed software - installed software, inserted dongle and pc couldn't 'see' dongle in spite of it being listed as a working device in device manager.

Popped it out and saw the manufacuturer/model info - a quick google, found the specific driver, installed, software restart - bingo

Even though it works on the workstations I'd still find and located an updated driver and whack it in.

 

[sparkplug]

Thanks Judge - will try that in the morning before they get in.

 

[sparkplug]

Not a lot to go on

 

[exeter_lad]

Network or Local Dongle

You don't say if the dongle is a network dongle (plugged into and administered by one machine over a network) or a local dongle (plugged into the laptop itself). As you have tested to ensure the other workstations are not using up the available licence instances, I assume it is a network dongle.

We use a variety of local and network dongles.

If it is a network dongle and the other workstations can see and use it, then the licence must be up to date. On our systems I would then consider the registry. The LOCAL_MACHINE/Software branch for the software we use has an environment variable which is set to network or local. If it is set to the latter it will not work with the network dongle as it is expecting to find a dongle locally.

Hope this helps?

 

[sparkplug]

been off on my holidays and only just seen this reply exeter_lad - Thanks! I'll give it a go on Tuesday.

It is a network dongle as you correctly guessed, and it's been driving me crazy!

 

[Womble]

That looks like a parallel port dongle - there are usually a few different parallel port settings in the BIOS. Try changing the mode and see what happens. You never know, it might just be the port has been disabled.

 

[sparkplug]

That looks like a parallel port dongle - there are usually a few different parallel port settings in the BIOS. Try changing the mode and see what happens. You never know, it might just be the port has been disabled.

Thanks for the suggestion - surely though the parallel port BIOS setting is only relevant to the server that has the network dongle attached to it?

The workstation with the problem doesn't have the dongle physically attached to it so I can't see how this would affect it. Admittedly I'm out of my depth on this so I'd be happy to be proved wrong....

 

[Womble]

Ah, I see - I thought that the dongle was local, but there was some co-ordination going on across the network, to limit the total number of licences.

Another thought then - laptops tend to be mobile and work in less friendly environments, so they tend to have firewalls. Maybe it's worth temporarily disabling any firewall software and seeing if that makes a difference?