Cashless catering - Cunninghams

[claireadams]

No idea where to put this so stuck it in General.

 

We've had cashless catering for a short while now, but it randomly locks up at the tills. Forcing them to power down and restart (sometimes once does it, sometimes twice) is the only way to get them up and running again (they go a little laggy before completly locking up) But inbetween these the software can run great for months. They're blaming our network (nothing else goes off over there) but we believe it to be either the tills or the software. Has anyone else had the lagging/freezing that could shed some light on the issue?

[Sibrows]

I've not had any lagging or locking up but be very careful as I've had some very poorly diagnosed faults and subsequent 'fixes' from Cunninghams. Including faults that they tried to pin on our network that essentially were traced back to a hardware fault with the server they provided and thus supported.

[Linfit]

Their default position is to say its your network. We had some terrible problems with lag and tills locking up when we first installed their system. Its got better and is pretty good now, but they basically blamed our switches, the fact that the server was virtualised, the fact it was on its own VLAN, anything really.

[claireadams]

Thanks for the replies. Both are helpful. @Linfit you don't know what they did to get it running ok do you?

[Linfit]

No, but they probably don't know either - we certainly didn't change any of our networking for them.

It seems to be one of those systems that takes a while to settle down and needs a lot of fiddling about initially, and then is OK once its stable, provided you don't change anything.

Its a massive bodge of software and little programs scattered all over the place, scripts and scheduled tasks, and I suspect that there is no such thing as a standard install, and their techs just wing it until they get it working.

[jmcdermott]

We had an issue which they claimed was due to a coupler being used between the till and the wall socket, increasing the length of the cable from switch to 20m instead of 15m, which we then took out. Problem turned out to be a network card fault in the top up machine.

[forkies]

We have this, if we reboot the switch that all the tills are connected to it works fine. Therefore we are isolating the tills network and giving the server a dedicated link to them so we can definitely rule out our network. Although same as you everything else is working fine!

[cullingsh]

There is definitely a culture of 'It's a problem with your network' with Cunninghams.

 

We have just had kit installed and one on the tills was trying to PXE boot on start-up and failing. Apparently, after two hours of the installer trying to fix it, it was a problem with our network. 5 seconds later I had it fixed by changing the boot order options.