A question that I see from SalesLogix Ryan Farleyistrators & developers fairly often is regarding the error “The provider on Server FOO is no longer in use. Please change your connection to the provider on server BAR.” that they encounter when attemting to establish a connection to SalesLogix. This problem usually happens when you configure more than one SalesLogix Server to point to the database. Basically, if you have multiple SalesLogix Servers, you can’t create a connection on the SalesLogix Server on “ServerA” and also a connection on the SalesLogix Server on “ServerB” to both point to the same database.

Note that I am talking about the connection as defined in the SalesLogix Server connection manager, not a connection defined on the login screen of a SalesLogix application.

When you create a connection with the SalesLogix Server it writes the server name to the pingserver field on the systeminfo. So, if you have multiple machines that you’ll be using – pick one to be the SalesLogix Server for that particular database. For example, choose ServerA to be the SalesLogix Server for the database and then always use ServerA when you create the connection on the sales client or other SalesLogix application.

In the case where you have a different SalesLogix Server for development and a second for production, all you need to do is create the connection on the SalesLogix Server on the production server and the pingserver field should be automatically updated to the new server name. All is good as long as you always now use the production server when choosing the server when making a connection. As soon as you attempt a connection using the SalesLogix Server on the development server, that is when you’ll get this error.

You’ll find this same problem when you get a copy of a SalesLogix database and restore it on your SQL server. If you already had a connection defined in the SalesLogix Server, then you’ll need to manually update the pingserver field on the systeminfo table. Many times I’ll have a development database set up for a customer. I have a connection defined on my development server to point to that database. I might at some point get a backup of my customer’s production database that I might backup over the old database. When I connect to the new database I will get the “The provider on Server MYDEVSERVER is no longer in use. Please change your connection to the provider on server CUSTOMERSERVER.” error because CUSTOMERSERVER is the value in the pingserver field on the systeminfo table. I need to manually change it with an update such as the following:

update systeminfo set pingserver = ‘MYDEVSERVER’

Basically, what it comes down to. When you create a connection using the SalesLogix Server, it writes the server name to the pingserver field on the systeminfo table. If you try to make a connection with a SalesLogix Sever by a different name, then you’ll get the error.