• When trying to access the second computer on my server I receive this error message. How do I fix it?
• Error “A network error occurred while communicating with connection manager. Please try again later.”

• Disable the Firewalls/Antivirus between the client PC and the server PC.  See the Related Resources section of this article for firewall whitelisting processes.
• Are there any hardware firewalls between the PCs that could be in the way? (eg a router?)

Troubleshooting steps:

1. Check if the connection manager is running on the server and the workstation.
2. Make sure the database opens fine locally on both server and workstation
3. Go into explore/tools/folder options/view and unselect “use simple file sharing”
4. Check that all computers belong to the same workgroup:
   1. Right click on “My computer”.
   2. Go to “Properties”, click on the “Computer Name” tab and compare the names for workgroup on server computer and the other workstation computer
5. Use the server’s ip address to open the data from the workstation:
   1. Find out the ip address of the server/main computer
   2. In the Open Company window, type the server’s IP address in the File name box (i.e. \\192.168.10.10\) and browse to the folder where the data is stored.
6. Verify the connectivity between the workstation and the server:
   1. On workstation computer, open command prompt and try to telnet the port 13531 on the server.
7. If you get any errors when using telnet then:
   1. Check the firewall settings both on server and workstation computers.
   2. Check the permissions for the Windows user
   3. Try logging in Windows as different user
   4. Open the ports in the firewall
   5. Power cycle the router for 30 secs
   6. Open the ports in the router, also if they are using the static ip on the main/server computer they can try to forward the port to the server/main computer’s ip address
   7. On the server open up the dbengine.ini file found in C:\Program Files\Winsim\ConnectionManager\MySqlBinary\5.0.38and add the line innodb_flush_method=normal.
      Note: This line modifies the behavior of the MySQL database and it is untested. This is for servers which are configured with RAID Level 2 or 3. Stop and Start the connection manager.
8. Enable Simple File Sharing on the router
9. Check the connection speed, if the network connection is too slow, Sage 50 will time out and it will also result in this error message
10. Try adding the Server IP address to the workstations hosts file:
    1. Open Notepad
    2. Go to File, Open and browse to C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
    3. Select the hosts file (make sure you are showing all the files in the lower right-hand side)
    4. Go to the end of this file and add a line with the ip address and the name of the server computer (where the Sage 50 Accounting data is stored). For example: 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com
11. Configure router to port forward both TCP and UDP with port # 13531 and 13540-13545.