Seagull Bartender: The Crippled Upgrade and a Case of the Crash Dumps
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We were using Seagull Bartender v10.0 Automation Edition with a 30-printer license to print Epicor ERP system data on labels in our manufacturing shops. Our company intranet site writes a bt file into a specific location that is watched by Commander. The file gets converted to btp by Commander, and the label prints. Bartender was running on a Server 2012 VM (all components - Seagull License Server, Commander, and the Bartender Suite) and humming along with no issues. We use a mix of Seiko Smart Label 440 / 650, Zebra ZT 220, and Zebra ZP 450 printers throughout our shops (all connected to Windows 7 Pro computers via USB), and the server had been serving the label printing needs of 4 physical sites.
Our shop workers have told me things worked great before we made any changes.
Then, we acquired a new location. They are using Bartender also, but it's a later version of the software. My boss requested we upgrade to 10.1 SR 4 so we can use their label files and just adjust them slightly to pull in ERP data since we host Epicor here at HQ.
The upgrade was simple enough to do, but the after effects just plain stink. We began to see inconsistency in label printing reliability. The right file would get created for Commander to detect, it would be converted, but a label might print a few seconds later or 15 minutes later. Sometimes the label would not print at all and never get to the print queue of the workstation in question. We're getting this information from shop leads, and sometimes by the time we would test, all would be fine.
I contacted Seagull to get some recommendations on what to do to try and resolve this. We turned on all kinds of logging and found Bartender was throwing errors and creating dump files. This would happen once or more per hour (sometimes many dump files and sometimes only one). The error messages would look like this:
2015-11-03 00:46:04 6668 Error Miscellaneous OK BarTender Image Dump: Saved dump file to 'C:\ProgramData\Seagull\BarTender\Dump\BarTend_0151.dmp'
2015-11-03 00:46:20 6668 Error Miscellaneous OK BarTender Image Dump: Saved dump file to 'C:\ProgramData\Seagull\BarTender\Dump\BarTend_0152.dmp'
2015-11-03 00:48:29 6668 Error Miscellaneous OK BarTender Image Dump: Saved dump file to 'C:\ProgramData\Seagull\BarTender\Dump\BarTend_0153.dmp'
2015-11-03 00:48:55 6668 Error Miscellaneous OK BarTender Image Dump: Saved dump file to 'C:\ProgramData\Seagull\BarTender\Dump\BarTend_0154.dmp'
2015-11-03 00:51:29 6668 Error Miscellaneous OK BarTender Image Dump: Saved dump file to 'C:\ProgramData\Seagull\BarTender\Dump\BarTend_0155.dmp'
2015-11-03 00:51:47 6668 Error Miscellaneous OK BarTender Image Dump: Saved dump file to 'C:\ProgramData\Seagull\BarTender\Dump\BarTend_0156.dmp'
2015-11-03 00:56:44 6668 Error Miscellaneous OK BarTender Image Dump: Saved dump file to 'C:\ProgramData\Seagull\BarTender\Dump\BarTend_0157.dmp'
2015-11-03 00:57:10 6668 Error Miscellaneous OK BarTender Image Dump: Saved dump file to 'C:\ProgramData\Seagull\BarTender\Dump\BarTend_0158.dmp'
They recommended doing things like using only Seagull drivers for the Zebra printers, making sure we had no corrupt drivers on the servers or the workstations, re-installing Bartender on the same server with AV disabled, running Commander as an application and not a service, or possibly installing on a new server.
It's not a terribly complicated setup, so after documenting the configuration and backing up the VM, I deleted the VM and built a new Server 2012 VM from scratch. I patched it with all Windows updates and then installed the latest version of Bartender Automation Edition (10.1 SR4). I checked driver versions on every workstation, found some version mismatches, and resolved them so that all Seiko label printers of the same model were on the same driver version. I ripped off the Zebra drivers from every workstation that had them and used the Seagull drivers as recommended. Then I installed the necessary drivers and could print to every single printer by dropping a bt file in the right spot. I would watch the print queue on each workstation from print management on the Bartender server to make sure printing worked. I also setup a single dedicated user account as a local admin for folks to login to the server with to avoid processes running under multiple user accounts.
About 36 hours ago (around 11 PM Sunday night) the newly provisioned server went into production. Things worked well with minimal issues all day yesterday...until last night. I was told the same issues were happening again. I found out Bartender is still creating dump files with the same errors as shown above.
I thought I would crack open one of these in Visual Studio and see what is happening. It's a similar story every time (before the server rebuild and after it).
Has anyone seen something like this happen? We could roll back to the previous version with a good bit of leg work, but after investing the time and effort thus far I would really like to make the newest version work. Any advice is much appreciated. -
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Oh $diety, you just gave me heartburn. Seagull v4?5?6? was a staple of my daily life years back.
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That's a new one on me, we ran all our bartender stuff bare metal. Wondering if that might be part of the issue? Have you poked around in your hypervisor to make sure all the parallel ports are assigned / match up? -
@MattSpeller said:
That's a new one on me, we ran all our bartender stuff bare metal. Wondering if that might be part of the issue? Have you poked around in your hypervisor to make sure all the parallel ports are assigned / match up?
From how he stated it, I inferred that the printers are all USB on physical Windows 7 machines out on the floor. Only the BT server is virtualized.
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@JaredBusch text wall made my eyes glaze over, thank you
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@JaredBusch said:
@MattSpeller said:
That's a new one on me, we ran all our bartender stuff bare metal. Wondering if that might be part of the issue? Have you poked around in your hypervisor to make sure all the parallel ports are assigned / match up?
From how he stated it, I inferred that the printers are all USB on physical Windows 7 machines out on the floor. Only the BT server is virtualized.
That is correct.
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I should also mention I never bothered installing AV software on the new VM so as not to cause issues with their installer. The ticket I put in with Seagull has been open since 10/27. I've been very underwhelmed at their response time to me updating tickets with more information for their technicians. I have called twice since that time and not been able to get to the technician assigned the case. Since there is so much information in the ticket now, other techs are hesitant to take that one over. If I do not get a response today, it will be escalation time in a big way.
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Here's the current suggestion from Seagull Support in addition to sending Bartender message logs, Bartender print job logs, and system / application logs on the server:
I would like to try making a change to Commander, I would like to change when Bartender restarts the process. Please follow the steps below
1: Open Commander and stop detection
2: Click on Detection Command Handler Setup
3: On the General tab in the Restart Process dropdown select "Every Command"
4: Start detection.
