Factory Talk Authentication Issue

[Ben 1]

Hello All, Just wanted to share my experience and be helpful to fellow programmers (Its been long since I posted anything...) I was running Logix5K on Windows Virtual PC (XP SP3)...than my host computer HDD crashed Fortunately had copies of vhd and I was up and running Rockwell machine fairly quickly. The Factory Talk View Studio worked without complain but while opening Logix5K, it asked "Log on to FactoryTalk". So I tried all Username & passwords, nothing worked. I looked up KB article "468494 - RSLogix 5000 V20 software promptsLog On to FactoryTalk when started". By the looks of it, this should have given enough clues to solved my issue but it didn't. The log in fail message said "There is no account for the host machine in the network directory", but there is no way to add it, since you can't log in. Why the software on virtual machine should look for a host machine in network directory is difficult to digest! I just want to use local machine for all my applications, no hi-fi security settings etc.... So my friends, only solution is to reset the factory talk services platform (credits to Rockwell Tech support). To do that, connect the Rockwell installation Hard disk (Toolkit owners have this), go to add/remove program on virtual machine, select "FactoryTalk Services Platform...", press change button, than select "repair". Once the installation is done, the host machine name magically appears in network directory and all previously used host and Virtual machine names are also there. Thats it..

[Ken Roach 194]

Thanks for sharing that ! I had a similar experience with a host HDD crash, but we use VMWare Workstation instead of the free XP Mode virtual machine in Windows 7. We did not have any difficulties with FactoryTalk while bringing the machine back up; we just copied our backup VM onto a fresh laptop, and started it up. In my opinion, VMWare Tools is the right level of integration between the VM and the host OS: enough to make copy-paste and networking work well, but not so much that accounts and security are intertwined. Did you feed back to RA Technical Support the specific circumstances of your failure and recovery ? Anecdotes like yours are useful to them, because they help build up the 'confidence rating' or 'usefulness ratio' for a Knowledgebase document, which raises its profile in the search system.

[Ben 1]

Ken, I guess the problem was not with the type of virtual machine but how the FactoryTalk security handles computers and users. If I kept the Host computer name as before, I could have avoided this situation. It would be a good experiment on your side to install the vhd on a different host computer (different name at least) and see what happens, you may share the experience. On a side note, I am fairly used to the Windows Virtual PC and it has worked for me so far (have Siemens, Omron, Mitsubishi, VB, Rockwell and few more working well on my Windows 7 SP1 Pro). Also any other machine would need a licensed XP where as windows creates the XP mode. And yes, I did explain everything to RA Tech support, hope they would add it to Knowledge base soon.