Sage 100

This client is on Sage 100 2016 Advanced.  They have been on it since October of 2016.  They moved from Sage 100 2013 Standard (yes from standard to advanced).  Now for the weirdness...  About once a week for the last 6 weeks the advanced client SOTA.ini on the terminal server shows up with what was the sota.ini file of the Sage 100 2013 Standard server side version.  So no [server] section in the file.  Once this occurs no one can access Sage.  We cannot identify what is triggering this.  Anyone ever seen this?  

There are about 10 people from 3 remote locations using this terminal server.

I first recognized based on the [server] section being missing and the file path of the [DFDM_FILELIST] section being those from 2013.  Didn't recognize it till the 4th or 5th occurrence.  The 2013 version was still on the terminal server so I moved it to a new location.  I am now going to rename this version 2013 sota.ini file.  I do believe the very first occurence was a SOTA file with 2 lines in it.  We have since put exclusions on their Sophos Antivirus.

------------------------------
Larry Bradford
Accounting Technology LLC Consultant and Owner
Accounting Technology, LLC
Fairfax VA
703-913-3500
------------------------------

I have an Advanced user struggling with something similar though I'm pretty sure it's not related to standard to advanced. They have periodically had to replace SOTA.INI. I am not sure if they are still having to do this. I gave them all sorts of advice on anti-virus exclusions but, as you probably know, end-users are significantly smarter and typically self-diagnose that excluding anti-virus "will never work because Office 365 runs without needing an exclusion". Only when the pain of making the manual swap of the SOTA.INI outweighs the burden of figuring out how their AV works do they tend to try our initial advice ( which 90% of the time would have saved them months of grumbling ).




------------------------------
Wayne Schulz - Schulz Consulting - 860-516-8990
------------------------------

I know what you mean regarding the antivirus and "everything else works fine".  I worked with their IT and asked to see the exclusion.  They showed me on the manager where they excluded it.  The antivirus issue typically leaves a fairly empty SOTA file.  This is truely date and everything using the one from their 2013 install.  VERY bizarre.

------------------------------
Larry Bradford
Accounting Technology LLC Consultant and Owner
Accounting Technology, LLC
Fairfax VA
703-913-3500
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 06-03-2019 10:26
From: Wayne Schulz
Subject: Sage 100 SOTA.ini file on terminal server

I have an Advanced user struggling with something similar though I'm pretty sure it's not related to standard to advanced. They have periodically had to replace SOTA.INI. I am not sure if they are still having to do this. I gave them all sorts of advice on anti-virus exclusions but, as you probably know, end-users are significantly smarter and typically self-diagnose that excluding anti-virus "will never work because Office 365 runs without needing an exclusion". Only when the pain of making the manual swap of the SOTA.INI outweighs the burden of figuring out how their AV works do they tend to try our initial advice ( which 90% of the time would have saved them months of grumbling ).




------------------------------
Wayne Schulz - Schulz Consulting - 860-516-8990
------------------------------

Sounds like something similar to system file protection, or a mis-configured %PATH%...

------------------------------
Kevin Moyes
Technical Systems Analyst
Munjal White Consulting Co.
Toronto ON
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 06-03-2019 10:45
From: Larry Bradford
Subject: Sage 100 SOTA.ini file on terminal server

I know what you mean regarding the antivirus and "everything else works fine".  I worked with their IT and asked to see the exclusion.  They showed me on the manager where they excluded it.  The antivirus issue typically leaves a fairly empty SOTA file.  This is truely date and everything using the one from their 2013 install.  VERY bizarre.

------------------------------
Larry Bradford
Accounting Technology LLC Consultant and Owner
Accounting Technology, LLC
Fairfax VA
703-913-3500
------------------------------


Original Message:
Sent: 06-03-2019 10:26
From: Wayne Schulz
Subject: Sage 100 SOTA.ini file on terminal server

I have an Advanced user struggling with something similar though I'm pretty sure it's not related to standard to advanced. They have periodically had to replace SOTA.INI. I am not sure if they are still having to do this. I gave them all sorts of advice on anti-virus exclusions but, as you probably know, end-users are significantly smarter and typically self-diagnose that excluding anti-virus "will never work because Office 365 runs without needing an exclusion". Only when the pain of making the manual swap of the SOTA.INI outweighs the burden of figuring out how their AV works do they tend to try our initial advice ( which 90% of the time would have saved them months of grumbling ).




------------------------------
Wayne Schulz - Schulz Consulting - 860-516-8990

I seem to remember a post (by Alnoor?) with a theory about how the ini might become corrupt if two users log in to Sage 100 at the same time.  The file gets replaced each time, and if it is being re-written while another user is logging in, the second user only gets a partial file, which gets written back (causing the new bad file with missing contents).
Disclaimer: my memory could be wrong though... I don't know the sota.ini file gets replaced each run.

------------------------------
Kevin Moyes
Technical Systems Analyst
Munjal White Consulting Co.
Toronto ON
------------------------------

Yup, that was me. We have a powershell script that runs on a scheduled task that takes care of this problem. 
Since we deployed it, we've had zero problems with SOTA.INI becoming corrupt. In our experience, it does seem to be caused by 2 users launching Sage at the same exact time (unlikely), however, the more likely scenario is a user "double-clicking" to launch Sage (if it's a remote app for instance), which causes to instances to write and re-write sota.ini at the same moment, causing the corruption. At least that's my theory. 

I'm actually currently working on a mod on the script that will make a copy of the correct sota.ini and keep it handy, as we've noticed that sometimes, the sota.ini doesn't even create the sota.tmp, and we end up with only the corrupt sota.ini, so having a usable backup that we can restore from will help. 

(I believe I had shared our script in a previous post)

------------------------------
George Khairallah
CTO | gotomyerp, LLC
george.k@gotomyerp.com | 877-888-5525
http://gotomyerp.com/
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 06-03-2019 10:43
From: Kevin Moyes
Subject: Sage 100 SOTA.ini file on terminal server

I seem to remember a post (by Alnoor?) with a theory about how the ini might become corrupt if two users log in to Sage 100 at the same time.  The file gets replaced each time, and if it is being re-written while another user is logging in, the second user only gets a partial file, which gets written back (causing the new bad file with missing contents).
Disclaimer: my memory could be wrong though... I don't know the sota.ini file gets replaced each run.

------------------------------
Kevin Moyes
Technical Systems Analyst
Munjal White Consulting Co.
Toronto ON
------------------------------

Hi - I believe we may have a fix for this if you want to email me directly...

(If you get a "no servers found" or some such message.....)

Jeff
(jfiddelman@exeplex.com)

------------------------------
Jeff Fiddelman
Exeplex, LLC
------------------------------