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Troubleshooting

Intermittent crashes working with a cloud database

This covers a wide range of intermittent errors including:

  • The semaphore timeout period has expired
  • The underlying provider failed on Open
  • An unexpected error occurred while saving the panel
  • The connected party did not properly respond after a period of time
  • Wait operation timed out
  • An exception has been raised that is likely due to a transient failure

These errors may occur in any part of the program when communicating with the database.

These errors can have a common underlying cause: The firewall rules allowing outgoing access to the cloud database are incomplete, and so Antigen Plus sometimes cannot connect to the database when the IP address changes.

Because Azure is a high-availability service, the IP address of the database server changes over time in order to balance resource use at the data center. Since Antigen Plus opens and closes connections to the database dynamically, multiple IP addresses for the database may be in use simultaneously. If your firewall is using an incomplete list of Azure IP addresses, then some of these connections may fail, causing intermittent errors.

The best solution is to use a DNS-based firewall rule to the database server rather than an IP address based rule as described in the networking section of the documentation.

Some firewalls do not permit the use of DNS-based firewall rules. In this case, you can use one of these workarounds:

  • Allow the workstations running Antigen Plus to connect to port 1433 at any IP address.
  • (Not recommended) Whitelist all IP addresses in the Azure IP address ranges for “Sql.EastUS”. Note that this list is updated weekly, so you will need to automate your firewall rules to update appropriately.

Unable to delete a lot because of an “unsaved panel”

If a user quits Antigen Plus without saving their work, we create an “unsaved panel” for that user. The unsaved panel is restored the next time that user launches the application.

Because this unsaved panel contains references to the selected cells in that panel, it prevents those cells from being deleted from the database.

To resolve this issue, either:

  1. Mark the cell or lot as out-of-stock rather than deleting it.

  2. Ask the user to log in and clear the selected cells. If there are no other references to those cells, they may now be deleted.

Logging in as a user who has left the organization

If you need to log in as a user who has left the organiztion (perhaps to clear their unsaved work), you can assign them an Antigen Plus password and then use the password to log in as that user.

  1. Log into Antigen Plus from an administrator account.

  2. Choose Maintain Accounts from the User menu.

  3. Double-click on the account of the absent user.

  4. Use the Change Password button to assign that user a password.

  5. Save the changes in the Change Password window, the Account Settings window, and the Maintain Accounts window.

  6. Choose Switch User… from the User menu.

  7. Log in with the name and password of the absent user.

This will allow you to log in as that user and perform any cleanup tasks, such as clearing the selected cells to remove the unsaved panel.

After fixing the problem, you may want to return to the administrator account and disable the account of the absent user.