Had two severe problems with WL at W6XR this weekend, as follows.
The computer configuration is two machines connected directly via ethernet
cards for M/2 style logging. Two minutes (literally) before the ARRL DX
SSB began we had WriteLog 10.15E give an apparently unprovoked WriteL32.exe
error and close itself on the slave computer (i.e., not the master computer
in the order that WriteLog has you start up its internal networking). No
problem we thought, just restart the computers for safety and go.
Didn't turn out that way. When we brought WriteLog back up and tried to
re-establish network connections it refused, saying the exchanges were
different between the two log files on the two machines and it shut down
the slave machine. These were the same files we had set up and tested with
successfully before the contest began, and which had successfully started
up about half an hour previously. Reversing the order of connection (so
the once crashed machine was the master) resulted in the same behavior on
the other computer.
Creating a completely new set of logs didn't help; again we got the
different exchanges error. (The contest exchange parameter was set to the
same string (NY) on both machines.)
What worked was totally uninstalling WriteLog from both machines,
installing the original registered version, installing the 10.14 update on
that, starting new logs then starting the network connections. So W6XR
made about 15 hand-logged contacts the first hour and we got in the game at
0107Z running 10.14.
Had another recovery issue after taking a power spike Saturday AM that shut
the computers down. This one took out the WriteL32.exe file on one
machine, necessitating another uninstall and reinstall from scratch of
10.14. Even after that, WriteLog refused to read in its temporary contacts
file, which I ended up having to copy and rename before restarting with the
No option (don't recover by auto-importing this file on restart). There
was no contact in process when the power strike hit this machine so it
doesn't seem the temp file should have been open and vulnerable at that
point. Opening it in a text editor revealed apparently uncorrupted data
and file termination. Later comparison showed those contacts still in the
log on the other computer, which was functioning as the master at that time.
These seem worthy of attention.
Mike N2VR
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