Vista 4.4 Server, workstation moved to VLAN - Datasets won't open

Vista/Vantage 8
1

Shot in the dark here, but I’m hoping there is someone around who can still help with 20-to-30-year-old software.

My company actively used Vista 4.4 as their sole ERP until 2016. When upgrading to 10.1 in 2017, the decision was made to only bring over data for parts/jobs/customers that had been active in the most recent 2 years. A brand new server was built for E10, and the Vista system was left intact as historical reference.

There are two reasons the data in that old Vista system is still accessed periodically to this day:

  1. We offer a 10-year warranty on some of the finished goods that were manufactured back then. Sometimes, the original order needs to be accessed to process warranty claims

  2. Sometimes, those customers from 2015 or earlier return and ask us to re-run or re-work a part we made for them years ago (we are an OEM/contract manufacturing company). When this happens, we are able to access old orders/drawings/rev levels, etc.

Essentially, we have the Vista database Server and an RDP client server, both VMs running on Windows Server 2008. Our Managed IT company was adamant that we “quarantine” this old Vista system from the outside world by moving the servers to a VLAN and attaching them to one physical workstation that remotely accesses the RDP Client server, which runs the Vista client application.

The move is complete and I am able to launch the Vista Application from the RDP client server and login using a number of our old credentials. Each time I login, a box pops up asking me to select the dataset I’d like to open, and all of the normal choices are displayed. The problem is, no matter which dataset I select, absolutely nothing happens. Nothing opens, no error messages. I noticed the ‘db’ folder in the Vista directory of the client machine is empty. I came across an old post suggesting to ‘optimize the dataset’, but I have no experience with this setup and don’t know the procedure for performing that function.

Is there anyone out there who can provide any direction or sources of old information which may help?

1 Like
2

I have been involved with migration of our company from Vista 4.4>Vista 8>ERP 10. I was very new to the ERP world at that time, so I wasn’t involved in much of the administration of the Vista 4.4…I took the reins once we migrated to Vista 8. But I recall our 4.4 environment relied on some ODBC drivers to function, I also believe the latest OS we had on the Server was 2003 rather than 2008.

Probably not much help, that was almost 15 years ago when that all transpired.

3

This is the direction I was thinking. I feel like there is a way to use some ODBC maintenance to reconnect the datasets to the client or something.

I’m checking through archived documentation to see if there are any related instructions.

4

I have a contact for you that adds another option to this scenario that you may find more economical and user friendly. Not to mention you wouldn’t need to build out reports or dashboards or whatever to display info.

5

I’m almost certain this is because the SQL database connections were originally made using domain/network credentials, and the new VLAN is not connected to the domain in any way. The client can remote into the app server, but the ODBC management wizard doesn’t find the SQL server upon attempting to connect.

@utaylor, thank you for the suggestions, but all of the data and dashboards are already there. I believe I just need to reconnect using a local environment rather than a domain-based environment.

1 Like
6

I guess what I was suggesting is that you don’t keep anything old around and you don’t quarantine anything. You move the data to your current ERP schema and create an environment for it that you log into to check the data like you mentioned.

But yeah, if you want to keep the old equipment around and maintain that sort of system architecture that’s good too. Whatever works.