Editor’s note: ATM Network technicians have the experience to solve even the thorniest problems, and routinely go above and beyond to do so. This is one such story.
When ATM Network installed an ATM in a county licensing bureau, they set it up to use an Internet connection instead of a phone line. That was both faster and cheaper for the client, since the government office where it was located already had a high-speed Internet connection, and using it meant the ATM didn’t need a separate dedicated phone line.
There was only one problem: the Internet connection didn’t work. The machine kept reporting that it would connect to the transaction server, only to have the transaction server drop the connection in the middle of transactions.
ATM Network spent two weeks and five visits troubleshooting. Our techs met with the county’s IT department, who assured us that their network was working fine, and the problem had to be the ATM. But our troubleshooting team couldn’t find anything wrong with the ATM.
The team ran Internet traces and got a puzzling result: the machine reported that the server was dropping connections, while the server reported that the machine was dropping connections. It should have been one or the other, not both.
Finally, the team hauled the machine back to the ATM Network warehouse, set it up there, and ran a test transaction. The Internet connection worked flawlessly.
Certain that the problem was with the network, the team went back to the county’s IT department and began asking questions, tracing the exact path that the ATM data followed through the network.
It turned out that the data first went through a city router (the licensing bureau was located in a city-owned building), then a county router, then a state router before being sent on to the transaction server.
The team tracked down each router and examined them. They discovered that the middle router — the one owned by the county — had a web filter on it.
A web filter is software that restricts access to certain sites. So if you don’t want your employees playing online games, you would set your filter to block the addresses of known gaming sites.
For some reason that filter had decided it didn’t like the address of the transaction server, and was blocking it.
Rather than totally disable the web filter or risk it blocking transactions again later on, the team gave the ATM a unique “static” address and then exempted that address from the filter. The machine has worked perfectly ever since.
