Quadient/Neopost ix machines and communication issues

[Vincent128]

So..it's mainly the iX3 but ever since the iX's came out there has been a shit ton of failed nightly communication calls ..which now locks the machines in a day rather than 90 like beofre.

Quadient land's answer is that the customer must rework their network infra structure to accommodate the postage machine...Like really?

So..here is what happens, in a mostly simple and somewhat guessing fashion...the machines go dark when they are asleep (cant alter these super sleep settings enough to matter)...Switches put the port to sleep...Ix wakes up and is ready to communicate right away and fails as quadient land forgot to program in any checks and balances in their protocol stack to make sure it has a clear path to communicate out.

This is even worse if the customer uses 802.1x which the units are not capable of - they have to put together a routing filter to strip the MAC address and make sure its vendor class is allowed to talk.

Switching the machines to Static IP helps ALOT but will not in 802.1x but here is a maybe workaround.

Give the machine an invalid secondary DNS ...
It will wake up and communicate right away to the primary DNS but will fail because the network is not ready to allow it to communicate...it will switch to the secondary, which will fail for obvious reasons...then it will try the primary again. We don't yet know how many times the machine will flip flop between trying but it's seems to give the network enough time to open the port or validate the 802.1x filter.

Thoughts?

[stopeon]

Re: Quadient/Neopost ix machines and communication issues

That's an interesting solution. I think I'll try that at my next opportunity.

When the dealership I work for talked to Quadient about this issue they told us we were the only ones in the entire country having this problem. They also suggested putting a small switch between the mail machine and the customer's network, in order to keep the port awake. Which will work IF you can convince the customer to allow you to put a switch on their network.

[Vincent128]

Re: Quadient/Neopost ix machines and communication issues

"we were the only ones in the entire country having this problem"
...I think that's their default answer when they are out of fucks to give..I swear we get that dumbass answer all the time...

That's an interesting solution. I think I'll try that at my next opportunity.

When the dealership I work for talked to Quadient about this issue they told us we were the only ones in the entire country having this problem. They also suggested putting a small switch between the mail machine and the customer's network, in order to keep the port awake. Which will work IF you can convince the customer to allow you to put a switch on their network.