One of the great things about Honeywell Trendview X-Series paperless recorders is that they communication via Ethernet. It’s great, because you can get data from your recorder anywhere on your plant network. But, since they’re network devices, you now have to understand how to troubleshoot network failures, and not just fix “regular” recorder issues.

Trendview recorders frequently connect to a local area network (LAN), so the recorded data can be easily transferred to the historian database portion of the recorder’s Trendserver Pro software (TSP).  TrendServer pro uses a standard Internet file transfer protocol (FTP) to grab data from the recorder. And in a lot of cases, a software scheduler is used to grab data on a periodic basis.

So, you’re cranking along, and the recorder’s talking perfectly to the server, and then one day you see one of the dreaded FTP failure messages.

So now, what do you do to diagnose and solve the problem?

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