Trouble shooting send/receive remotely

Question

One of our translators is having trouble with send/receive on Linux with PT8. Since I am not in the same country, finding the problem has been difficult. Are there log files somewhere that I could have him send me that might show what is failing? Or does anyone have a better suggestion for diagnosing the problem?

JohnBrownie

Answer 1

It appears that there is corruption in the repository. Here is a picture of the output:

4be0b97a-19a0-48b7-85df-af56a39e949f768×1024 109 KB

My reading of it is that there’s nearly half a megabyte missing (or extra?) in the revisions change log, the Daniel file is nearly a megabyte off, and there are some other issues.

Daniel is the book he has been drafting, and has already been lost once due to user error (he accidentally deleted the virtual machine file), so I’d like to recover as much as possible of that. My thought was to ask him to send the SFM file and attempt to reconstruct it, but if there might be a spare megabyte of data there, that may not be feasible.

So, where can we go from here?

Answer 2

Here are a few things I always try to look at:

• Are they doing S/R from the menu? Is Internet checked? Is the project checked?
• Is there an error message?
• Is this a project that is already on the computer? If not, it can take a long time to receive a project with a lot of history.
• Are they trying to S/R multiple projects? If so, try one at a time to figure out which might be causing a failure.

Comments

anon848905:

• Are they doing S/R from the menu? Is Internet checked? Is the project checked?

Doing S/R from the menu. Internet is enabled and checked, project is checked.

anon848905:

Is there an error message?

I don’t think that there is an error message. A progress dialog comes up, but goes away before he has a chance to read it carefully. Possibly it’s the “Project Mussau is busy” message.

anon848905:

Is this a project that is already on the computer? If not, it can take a long time to receive a project with a lot of history.

The project is already on the computer, and was successfully doing S/R some months ago.

anon848905:

Are they trying to S/R multiple projects? If so, try one at a time to figure out which might be causing a failure.

He has three projects: the main project, the VE, and a dialect adaptation. He’s only working on the main project.

I’ll hopefully get to talk to him one day next week and get more details, but this is what I understand from him.

Answer 3

I just talked with the translator, and we tried S/R a few times. Each time it was the same.

The process was choosing S/R from the File menu. It apparently went to the Internet and found that there were changes to the main translation and the VE. He clicked on All to ensure that all the projects were being sent and received, then clicked Send/Receive. A progress bar comes up, saying that it is working on each of the two projects, but it just goes away, and that is the end of the interaction.

So nothing actually gets sent or received, and the Changes Sent and Received dialog does not appear.

I will talk to him again tomorrow, and it would be nice if I could offer a suggestion to change something to make it work again. Anybody know what could be going wrong?

Comments

I would still recommend only trying to S/R one project at a time. This will identify if the problem is specific to a single project or not. If a single project fails to S/R then you should run the diagnostics that can be found under the Advanced menu. This should let you know if there is a problem with the local repository of the project.

Screenshot 2022-04-13 08.33.50946×705 181 KB

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I agree with @anon848905:

1. First identify which project is having issues (Project menu > Send/Receive THIS project)
2. Verify the project repositories for that project
3. Then use the “Give Feedback” tool for that specific project (unless it’s not project-specific)

Also, have you tried resetting Paratext?

Answer 4

The best thing to do is to get him to send in a problem report (Help > Give feedback) after trying again. That will include some log files to help us figure out what is going on.

Answer 5

OK, I just talked with Dovlin, and the Mussau-Emira project failed to send/receive. I talked him through sending feedback, but we’re not sure if it went through, as there was a message that it didn’t send, and asked if he wanted to retry, to which he said yes, but there was no further confirmation dialog.

Just to be clear, this is PT8 on Wasta Linux 16.04, in VirtualBox on an older MacBook Pro macOS 10.9 (Mavericks). We hope to update his computer at some point, but Covid restrictions have prevented my getting to PNG in the last two years, and our next projected visit is late this year. In the meantime, we want him to be able to continue working, and not lose what he has been doing since the last successful send/receive.

Answer 6

JohnBrownie:

…we’re not sure if it went through, as there was a message that it didn’t send, and asked if he wanted to retry, to which he said yes, but there was no further confirmation dialog.

It does not appear to have gone through. When a user clicks to retry, Paratext will try again automatically behind the scenes when Paratext is restarted. If it fails multiple times (Paratext is restarted multiple times), I think Paratext will then tell the user that something went wrong and ask the user to send it in manually.

Answer 7

OK, we’ll try it next time. I sent him instructions on how to verify the repository, and how to reset Paratext, so we’ll see if either of those will help.

Answer 8

I know it’s been Easter, but I’d like to be able to tell Dovlin something practical he can do to recover his work and move forward, but I hesitate to go ahead without advice from someone who has been here before.

Answer 9

I think the best thing to do is to have him send in a problem report (Help > Give feedback). Someone should be able to help him through what to do.
(Help is coming…)

Comments

Here are some steps to save the work you do have and still delete the corrupted project and get a clean copy from the server.

1. Backup your project
2. Restore the backup to a new project name
3. Delete your local copy of the project
4. Retrieve the project from the server using send/receive
5. Use Tools/Compare Texts to find changes between the restored project and the project created in step 2.

You can find more detail on these steps on this page: https://lingtran.net/Temporary+new+project

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If he is able to make a backup and send it to you via Dropbox or something (I don’t think email will allow .zip files to be sent), that would enable you to merge changes.

An alternative way to share files without needing to create an account is to use https://ufile.io. I just tried it and it’s remarkably simple.

1. Go to https://ufile.io

2. Drag and drop the file:
   

   

   image1166×322 95.7 KB

3. Copy the link:
   

   

   image717×242 50.6 KB

4. Paste the link into an email.

Answer 10

Thanks for the hints. I’ll see where we go when I speak to him, Thursday or Friday, I hope. I should be able to talk him through using ufile.io to send me the file. He has pretty good internet in the village as long as he is close to the satellite building which provides the WiFi link.