Questions[point-of-sale](server)

We look after a series of restaurants which is a collection of point of sale terminals and a typically a single workstation per site.

We have one site that is causing a fair amount of head ache and no amount of google searching is answering the question.

In one particular site the network keep crashing. Crashing on the lines of all network devices stop responding , you can't see anything on the network and you can not get on to the internet. This happens multiple times a day or can go for days working fine. Once the issue happens they can no longer process credit cards of interac transactions... primarily the reason they would like to see it solved.

To fix the issue the staff unplug all the ports from the switch and power cycle the switch and router. ( I am unclear if this was a result of the power cycling, however we replaced a switch yesterday that had quite literally burnt up and also took out the router )

So after much checking we have narrowed the issue down to a the point of sale terminals. Which if we pull the power on the terminals and then power them back up also seems to fix the issue.

The network is nothing fancy a basic switch and lines running out the the registers and the point of sale terminals.

We have explored the ideas of putting in a managed switch and using spanning tree or storm control etc... based on that it could be a broadcast storm of some sorts. I am not wanting to go buy a bunch of more expensive switches if it won't solve the issue, however the client is not against it. Alternatively maybe there is a setting on the POS terminals that needs to be turned off, however we have been in contact with the provider with no success.. further to that all of the other stores are working fine.

Currently we have not run wireshark or anything on the network yet, however it could be a next step. But, if someone had experienced this before or has an idea ... it might save me some time.

Thanks!

I have an Openbravo POS workstation with a customer display pole. The pole is VFD-860. When I click on the products on the Sales page of Openbravo, the display responds but displays garbage:

When I turn the pole off and then on. I get this:

So it is not exactly broken. Com port is correct because otherwise it would not respond at all.

There is a configuration utility with the pole but it is either the wrong version (it says it's for VFD660_460 but the documentation at http://bit.ly/iUbmpB says that VFD860 uses software which installs itself to Start menu > Programs > VFD-660_460) or there is some other problem because whatever choice I make there, after clicking Accept I always get Device Time Out error (even though I see another garbage character appearing onto the display the second I click Accept).

How to fix that?

I've read a lot about PCI DSS and its requirements, but I'm unclear on what exactly determines whether an organization needs to worry about PCI DSS compliance.

We accept payments using a basic HiSpeed 6200 POS terminal which is connected to the internet through our office LAN. We aren't using VLAN's. The terminal isn't integrated with any payment processing applications, it just prints out paper receipts.

Do I need to worry about PCI DSS compliance?

Before I go through learning about sccm can you guys tell me if it is possible to update and organize Pos systems, windows updates, software updates, which are not within an ad domain...How does this work is it workgroup etc. and online links much appreciated....

Cheers

Is it possible to connect a receipt printer to a telephone for printing similar to how a Credit card terminal works when connected to a telephone line.

Our clients donot have internet connections where we can connect the printer over Ethernet, so was thinking if it was possible to do the same via telephone line.