Gateway Troubleshooting

The whole cafe is offline

Start at the line, not at the software. Sharing the internet does not depend on your license and does not stop when it expires, so a cafe with nothing at all is almost never a HandyCafe problem.

1. Is the gateway PC on?
2. Does the gateway PC itself reach the internet? If it does not, it is the modem or the line.
3. Is the cable from the gateway's second card to the switch seated?

HandyCafe Server keeps working through all of this. Sessions, billing and the till do not go through the gateway.

Server cannot reach the gateway

Check the address and the port in Settings > Gateway, then check that the gateway PC is on. A gateway that answered yesterday and not today is usually a firewall rule that changed on the gateway PC, or a PC that picked up a different address.

The certificate changed

Server will not connect until this is sorted out, and that is deliberate.

• If the gateway was reinstalled, connect again to trust its new certificate.
• If it was not, somebody else may be answering on that address. Find out why before you trust it.

A change did not apply

Editing a setting does not change the network yet. The change bar at the top collects what you edited and Apply puts it live.

After applying, Server checks that it can still reach the gateway and then confirms. If it cannot, the gateway puts the previous settings back on its own after a minute. This is what stops a wrong network setting from locking you out of your own gateway, and it is why a change that looked fine can quietly revert: nobody confirmed it.

If a change could be neither applied nor undone, the panel says so in red. Apply a configuration again to put the gateway back on a known state.

A site will not load, but the rest of the internet works

1. Check the Web Filter. A category may be catching it. Add it to the allow list.
2. Turn off Split site names in Options. It helps with some blocks and breaks a few banking apps.
3. Check whether that device has a speed limit low enough to time the site out.

One station is offline, the rest are fine

Check whether it is blocked in the Devices tab before looking at the station itself. A blocked device still reaches HandyCafe Server, so it looks alive from the Server's side while the customer sees nothing.

Consoles report strict NAT

See Port forwarding and firewall. On Windows the usual cause is the SSDP Discovery service holding the port consoles search on.

The gateway features are off

The banner says which of four things happened: the license has not reached the gateway yet, it does not include the gateway features, it could not be checked for two days, or there is none. Internet sharing keeps working in every one of them.

The gateway features come with HandyCafe Genesis, and during the trial.

Reading the log

The gateway's own page, at https://127.0.0.1:8443/ on the gateway PC, carries the log. It is the place to look when Server cannot reach the gateway at all and you need to know whether the gateway is running.

The Log tab can show only warnings and errors. It can search for a word such as a card's name and load older lines. Download diagnostics saves one file with the gateway's settings, its logs and what Windows reports about the network cards, without passwords. Send that file when you contact support.

Restarting the gateway

Restart it from the gateway's own page (Status tab) or from the icon in the notification area, not from Task Manager. The gateway first stops the services that depend on it. Task Manager does not do that. The restart fails there.

When the gateway stops

• Sessions, billing and everything else in HandyCafe Server keep working.
• The PCs on the cafe network lose internet until it comes back.
• Wi-Fi tickets already in use keep their remaining time. A member signing in with a username needs Server to answer, so that waits.