Mac/Parallels help

[mickey]

I’m having an issue with RailPro on my Mac running Parallels. First, the whole machine has been tested and I know it works.  Specifically what is going on is it cannot connect with the ring server.  The icon at the top says Internet not connected, most of the time.  Yet I can use any other Internet program. I can browse with several browsers, I can send and receive email via Outlook, I can get stock quotes, weather, control/view home cameras and thermostats at home and away, other programs can do their Internet things like check for updates, execute POST commands and other php (or whatever that stuff is) things.  I’ve talked to Tim and he has no ideas. I travel between our home and our mountain cabin.  Right now I’m at the cabin trying to get several of these installed and setup.  At home at one point it was asking me to allow some exception, but still would not work with consistency.  I have made sure there are no antivirus programs running and see no firewall blocks.  I even run it as Admin.  Even tried as Windows 7 compatibility.  At one point I stumbled into rebooting the whole machine and restarting Parallels and it worked for a short time then stopped.  Another reboot and it worked again, for awhile because I played with downloading a few of the pictures from the Ring server.  But now at the cabin and nothing seems to work.  As a programmer myself, I asked Tim if he was using some special port or something and he said not that he knows of.  But since it "has" worked at one point it has to be some sort of simple setting somewhere.  Any ideas?  And no I don’t have a windows only machine.

[William Brillinger]

Searching the forum for the word "Parallels" will yield a number of results that may be helpful.

[mickey]

I did try that and none were helpful. That was my first approach. BUT, I did try something new and it’s working, at least for now.  So I’ll cover it here in case others search for it.  There is a Reinstall Parallel Tools function.  I remember long ago I was having some strange issue with Parallels and all their tech did was do that and restart Windows. I tried that and now it’s working. Who knows.

[William Brillinger]

Sounds like progress!

As an aside, windows is happiest if it is rebooted fully every few days. I would suggest properly shutting windows down at the end of a session instead of putting it to sleep or saving its state.

[mickey]

That’s why I’m afraid of getting one of these new electric cars. Can you imagine have to reboot in the middle of downtown traffic during 5 o’clock rush hour. 

[William Brillinger]

That’s why I’m afraid of getting one of these new electric cars. Can you imagine have to reboot in the middle of downtown traffic during 5 o’clock rush hour.

That why they don't run on windows

[mickey]

And it stopped working, even after going thru the steps.

[faithie999]

this isn't the answer you're looking for, but...

I'm a diehard Apple fanboy and have been for decades.  but, for cases like using railpro, I keep an old windows laptop around.  unlike old apple computers, an old laptop (even 15 yrs old) will run windows 7, and probably windows 10, well enough to use with railpro.

Ken

[G8B4Life]

... As a programmer myself, I asked Tim if he was using some special port or something and he said not that he knows of.

As a programmer yourself, you'd probably shake your head at how the networking was written. While using a port registered as used by something else it is not as far as I know (it used to be), there are still other issues that can cause problems.

There's a few things that can be tried, and as a programmer yourself I'm going to assume (dangerous I know) that you'll be able to interpret the results of any tests you make.

Firstly, if your using wireless try using a wired connection. There has been an issue that I couldn't solve at the time where on wireless the destination IP address for RPA ended up being the same as the source IP address, which of course resulted in the router simply sending RPA's outgoing packets back to itself!

Secondly, if it isn't already, make sure the network adapter for Parallels is in bridged mode; RPA doesn't particularly like PAT (Port Address Translation) so this usually does this trick.

If that doesn't work then you'll probably have to run some other tests. A couple of good, free, don't need to install programs for testing on the Windows side are:

Current Ports: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/cports.html
LiveTcpUdpWatch: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/live_tcp_udp_watch.html

With those what you are looking for is if RPA has the local port of 4608. The destination port is also 4608 (shaking your head now?) and the destination IP is 99.110.149.169 . LiveTcpUdpWatch is probably the better one, start it and then start RPA.

If you don't get anything useful out of that then you'll need to go down a harder road and watch what's going through the network adapters themselves with something like WireShark. I don't know if they have anything like that for Mac though.

- Tim (no, not that Tim)

[mickey]

I’m pretty sure it has something to do with how Parallels handles things.  But like most tech support lines, they are pretty useless and very difficult to understand their non American accents.  I just wish American companies would hire American support people.

[G8B4Life]

I'm pretty sure it has everything to do with RPA, and I do believe I have the real world experience to say that, but I'd be very happy to be proven wrong.

- Tim

[mickey]

I just want an answer for it to consistently connect.

[G8B4Life]

Unfortunately none of us here have magic wands that'll allow us to try and give an answer for that without knowing what's actually going wrong. You'll have to do some diagnosis at least and I gave you a few places you can start. Troubleshooting RPA's connection issues can be quite difficult (though the root cause is well known) and I'm afraid there's just isn't a blanket answer I can give you.

- Tim

[gregeusa]

The answer to simple and consistent is an inexpensive PC or laptop running windows... you can find them for under $200, and used for $100