My bridge shows offline

A bridge counts as online only when PrintSol has heard from it in the last 3 minutes. When it goes quiet, PrintSol marks the bridge offline, marks its printers offline, and puts "Bridge … is offline" on each printer card. The printers themselves keep printing; PrintSol just cannot see or reach them.

A single printer can also go quiet while its bridge is fine (switched off, off the Wi-Fi). After 3 minutes without a report its card says "Not reporting", PrintSol asks the bridge to reconnect it every 2 minutes, and after 10 minutes the people who get bridge e-mails hear about it. When it reports again, Activity says how long it was gone.

What you will notice

• The connection pill on the printer cards turns red and the buttons say "No live link to this printer".
• Pause, stop and starts are refused until the bridge is back.
• After five minutes the owners and managers who have that alert switched on get an e-mail.
• The menu shows "offline" next to the bridge indicator.

Checks, in order

• Is the PC on and awake? A sleeping PC stops the bridge. Turn off sleep for that machine.
• Is the bridge running? Look for its tray icon, or open it from the Start menu. Settings → start with Windows makes it come back after a restart.
• Open the bridge window. The line at the bottom left should say "bridge online". The Activity tab says why if not.
• Run the Doctor in the bridge window (or "printsol-bridge doctor" for the command-line version).
• Make sure it is the latest version. If PrintSol logs that a bridge sent a report it could not read, update the bridge on that PC.

Other states

• "paired · no report yet": the bridge was paired but has never reported. Open the bridge window on that PC and check its Activity tab.
• "Two copies of bridge … are running at the same time": close one of them.
• "not paired any more" in the bridge window: it was removed in PrintSol. Generate a new pairing code and pair it again.