Ever had a problem with Peachtree Accounting software? Ever had it open and appear as a running process, but not do anything you can see? Ever had it open, then lock up and throw cryptic error codes that even kb.sagesoftwareonline.com could not find?! I SURE DID!
Boy this software was annoying, and the fix that ended up happening was even funnier.
Peachtree has two types of connections when sharing data for multiple users off of a server installation. The first is basic windows file sharing, the second is a service-to-service connection between both ‘Pervasive’ services.
The first method, windows file sharing, REQUIRES you to map a network drive and use that – fine. The second method, the service-to-service connection, is nearly transparent from an options point of view.
There is no configuration file for this connection, nor is there a way to direct it somewhere – INSTEAD Peachtree tries to ‘figure out’ where its service connection is headed by literally reading the mapped network drive location specified, and trying to pull out the server location. It also tries to figure out the netbios name by excluding everything after the first period (’.') symbol.
So, when i mapped a drive to the ip on the network, 192.168.1.10, it literally ended up giving me a message something like – could not connect to service on server ‘192′. That’s right – the program reached out for server ‘192′ because it would be where the hostname would sit in a FQDN like ’server.some.domain.local’.
Mapping the drive to the direct netbios name, not to the domain name fixed the program locking up, and running as a process with no interface visible.
God forbid I plan on using DFS in the future, this software will just tank.