Cannot communicate with the Oasys Server

The following message is displayed whenever communication cannot be established with the Oasys server.

Cannot communicate with the Oasys server. There are only really three reasons why this could be happening.
1. You cannot connect to the internet.
2. The Oasys server or website is having a problem.
3. Your firewall is blocking the connection.
Please click on the link below to work out what the problem is. The website
is able to restart the Oasys Server if this is the problem.

What to do

Oasys needs a connection to the internet. Being as you are looking at this page this is probably fine.
The website / server goes down for a few minutes relatively regularly (most days - our apologies). It is a very rare event for it to be down for more than a day. So it is worth trying again in a couple of minutes.
If (1) and (2) are OK then there is probably a problem with your firewall. Please look at the Firewall issues in Oasys page for more information.
The Oasys program needs to know where the Oasys server is. The location should only change very rarely and we will make it very obvious on this page when this happens. If you want to check it look at the "Other Problems" section at the bottom of the page.

Firewalls

The Oasys program works fine with the standard Windows Firewall and N3, the NHS Network. Oasys sends binary and encrypted content in its messages which might cause a problems for some firewalls, although we have not seen this happen as yet.

Please look at the Firewall issues in Oasys page for more information.

What about saving my work?

If you cannot connect to the server you will not be able to open or create any records.

However any records you have open can be temporarily saved on your hard disk until the server is available again.

Clicking on "File - Save" will try to save the record to the server. If this does not work it will save a copy to your hard disk temporarily. Next time you successfully log on to the Oasys Server you will be asked if you want to save the record to the Server. You can also do this manually by clicking "Tools - Save Local Backups". Please note that until it is saved to the server anyone opening the record will not be able to see any changes you have made.

See Record saved as local backup for more details.

Comments

I have run the Oasys start up, but cannot communicate with the Oasys server. I'm online, have seen from the test page that the Oasys server is running, so I wonder whether it's the firewall. Have you had any problems with the Welsh NHS firewall? NHS.net doesn't extend to Wales - don't know if that's relevant or not - Thanks

7/7/2011

Firewalls usually block in one of three ways

The first block by port alone, and Oasys uses port 80 (which is the standard) so it is unlikely that this is a problem.

The second is to block by content. Oasys sends Binary messages which some firewalls don't like. There is no way round this as Oasys encrypts the data before sending it and the encrypted data is in Binary form. You can see if this is a problem by pressing "Cancel" on the login form when it pops up and then clicking "Tools - Check Oasys Server is Online" from the main menu. This sends a text message so it will work if the firewall is blocking binary messages. So if this works but everything else doesn't then the firewall is blocking binary messages. You will need to set the firewall to allow "application/binary" in this case.

The third is to block by application. In this case the firewall only allows programs access if you have specifically asked it to do so. In this case you will need to allow acccess for "oautil.exe" (or "oautilasm1.exe" / "oautilmwd.exe" for the Asma-1 and Mini-Wright Digital versions).

Your IT department should be able to help given the above information.

good luck!