Friday 3 August 2012

Troubleshooting QuickBooks Network Connectivity

The following is a re-post of our post to the SBS2K Yahoo list:

***

First place to start would be with their Network Test Tool. It will give you the full host of things missing/broken between the client and the server.

  1. Make sure the database manager is up to date and the exceptions are in the firewall on _both_ the server and the clients. We use a custom GPO setup for QB/Simply/LoBs.
  2. Make sure that none of the previous QuickBooks user services accounts are running and/or installed in Services.MSC.
    1. QuickBooksDB19
    2. QuickBooksDB22
    3. ETC.
      • Whatever the latest one is should be the only one running.
  3. You may need to use the registry editor to DELETE any references to the specific QuickBooksDB19 entries under SERVICES only (ignore Legacy).
    1. We have disabled the earlier versions in Services.msc only to have QB Database Manager re-enable them.
    2. Make sure that the QuickBooksDB22 or whatever has Read/Write at the NTFS level (we set share to EVERYONE=FULL) for the QB company files.
  4. Direct the QB Database Manager to scan and set the folder(s) that the QB company files reside in on the server.
  5. Once the above steps are run through your QB should work as expected.

As a rule we have not had to mess with anything network related on SBS 2008/2011 Standard to get QB working.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have used the sc command to delete these old services:

sc delete (servicename)

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Thanks for pointing that out! :)

Philip

Mike said...

I should point out that a new database server can't server the old company files. This is important if the client is say an accountant that opens files from several years of quickbooks. in that case Intuit recomends having all the relevent years of the database manager installed over eachother from oldest to newest.

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Mike,

That has not been the case for us. If we have any other version of the QuickBooksDBxx running than the most current the users cannot open earlier company files.

So, we install the latest and clean out the bits of the previous version that the Intuit installer missed.

The message users get when opening an earlier version if both QuickBooksDBxx versions are running is something along the lines of "You are opening a newer file hosted on an older version server software" or the like.

Thanks,

Philip

Mike said...

Here is the relivent quickbooks KB

http://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/support/articles/INF13248

The issue we found was that the missing years could not be opened in multiuser mode. In our case we had 2010 and 2012 installed, and only the 2009 and 2011 company files had the issue. Reporting a database connection failure. Removing all the copies and installing in order resolved for us.