My bridge shows offline

A bridge counts as online only when PrintSol has heard from it in the last 90 seconds. 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.

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.