TITLE
    At Ease: At Ease Server Prefs Common Issues
Article ID:
Created:
Modified: 		30844
11/23/98
3/1/99
TOPIC

    There are several common issues resulting from corruption of At Ease Server Prefs in At Ease 4.0 and 5.0. Because throwing out these preferences does not cause a substantial inconvenience, these problems are all easily remedied by deleting the Server Prefs and rebuilding them from scratch.

DISCUSSION

    The "At Ease Server Prefs" are in the Preferences folder in the System Folder on the server. (In the case of At Ease 5.0, they are named "At Ease Server Prefs 5.0".) It is the one and only preference file for the "At Ease Server (5.0)" extension. This is the server, which the At Ease workstations communicate with, before bringing up the At Ease log-in screen. Therefore, the At Ease Server Prefs contain all of the information that is needed by the At Ease Server Extension:
    • The list of workstations served by that particular At Ease Server
    • Whether At Ease is on or off
    • The AppleShare Volume name, user, and password for the volume containing the At Ease Items WG (5.0) folder.

    Deleting the At Ease Server Prefs requires that you drag the Server Prefs to the Trash and then immediately restart the server. Once the server is restarted, you can empty the Trash at a convenient time. Deleting the preferences will set all of the above settings back to their defaults, that is, there will be no workstations on the list, At Ease will be off, and there will be no path to the At Ease volume.

    NOTE: Because of this, it is important that you know how your At Ease Setup logs in to the AppleShare server.) You will need to launch the At Ease Administration program to reconfigure these data.

    When you launch the At Ease Administration for the first time after throwing out the server prefs, it is normal to see an error message, usually something along the lines of "The server has not been configured properly," though this may vary somewhat. You will then be prompted to re-enter the information At Ease needs to log into AppleShare (AppleShare volume, username, password) to access the At Ease databases. If you get in and your users and groups are not there, you entered AppleShare log-in information different from what was being used by At Ease previously.

    NOTE: When this happens, the databases with your user and workgroup information have not been deleted, however it is beyond the scope of this article to help you locate them.

    In most cases, however, you will be asked for your administrator password your users, groups and all of their settings will be there when you log in. At this point, you will need to tell the server which workstations it serves; to do this, go to the Configuration menu and select WorkstationsŠ. Add the workstations back in, turn At Ease on if it is off and then quit At Ease Administration; the workstations will have to be on to be added.

    The list of common symptoms that this will probably fix is:
    • "Could not write workstation list to server" message from the At Ease Administration program.
    • Other strange behaviour of the Workstation List, like workstations you've added not appearing the next time you launch Admin, workstations spontaneously disappearing from the list, etc.
    • Workstations that have just been added to the list being told that the server doesn't serve them.
    • In addition, any symptom happening to many or all of the At Ease workstations on a network before the user list comes up has a good chance of being a corrupt Server Prefs. However, wait at least three minutes before assuming that a Macintosh has frozen if there is no response; it might be waiting for a network timeout.

Document Information
Product Area: Apple Software
Category: At Ease
Sub Category: General Topics

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