With any complex communication system, there can be problems which cause it to not work as planned.  It could be a power failure,  electrical failure of a component, computer crash, cut cable, broken antenna, lightning damage, or a host of other unforseen issues.  Most of these are easy to deal with, but quickly being notified when they happen can be important.

You are able to monitor your GPS tracking system if your system uses RavTrack PC or any other GPS tracking software that allows you to create an alert if a vehicle does not report in.  By configuring your RF infrastructure components to also work as GPS transponders, the same tools used to monitor vehicles can be use to monitor your system.

For example, if you use a repeater in your system, configure it to periodially tranmsmit its GPS position also.  This way, if the antenna fails, power goes out, or it just stops working, your GPS monitoring software will send an alert.

With RavTrack PC, you can setup an Alarm and Monitoring Rule to help you monitor your radio network, server, or system operation.  Using the “No Reports” parameter monitoring feature, you can configure an alert to send an email to IP or Management personnel if your system stops working.

Monitoring System Components

To determine if part of all of the GPS tracking system is working, the periodic GPS position messages sent over the air may be monitored, and if they stop coming in, an alert can be generated to notify personnel of a potential system problem.

The easiest way to monitor the radios in your network is to configure them to report their GPS positions over-the-air.  Then configure an Alarm and Monitoring Rule using the No Reports parameter monitor to send an email if the item being monitored does not report in within a preset time period.  This will cause the Alert email to be sent if a part of the GPS tracking system fails such as broken antenna, cut cable, failed power supply, lightning damage, and unplugged serial cable.

Most radio transceivers, such as the M7 GX series of radios, which are used at a base station site may also be configured to output standard NMEA GPS position messages every 5 seconds.  This periodic local NMEA GPS message can also be used to determine if the base station radio is alive and operational.  To use the NMEA GPS position in an alert, you must configure the Communication Channel to interpret the NMEA GPS data as a tracked object in your system.  There is an option to Interpret GPS data w/o ID as ObjectData in the Systems Communications configuration tab.  If this enabled, RavTrack PC will create a new tracked vehicle with an ID 900X where X is the communications channel.  RavTrack PC will place the location of the vehicle 900X at its GPS position.

If there is a GPS transponder in the network that always is powered on and working, then the position report from that unit may also be used to check for system operation.

Monitoring a Server running RavTrack PC

The technique described above will work to monitor individual system components such as receivers, cabling, repeaters, and antennas.  But if a main server running RavTrack PC fails, the failed server cannot report itself failing.  A solution to this dilemma is to also run RavTrack PC on a management workstation, and then configure the same No Reports Alert on the workstation.  If the a server fails, causing the RavTrack system to stop recording GPS tracking data, the workstation’s No Reports Alert will then trigger, send an email, and/or alert the operator.

If you are running your GPS tracking system using RavTrack PC on a Windows XP computer, you may want remote users to be able to access the tracked objects database from a remote computer that is not on your local netwrok.  You may be able to do this using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection.

This article describes how to setup VPN access to a Windows XP computer.   VPN access will allows you to network two computers together, even if they are not on the same local network.  It will work across the Internet, while still maintaining security and privacy.

You will need Windows XP Professional with SP2 or SP3 installed.

How to Configure VPN host on a Windows XP computer

1. From the Start menu, open the Windows Control Panel.
2. Double-click the Network Connections item in Control Panel. A list of existing network connections will appear.
3. Choose the ‘Create a new connection‘ item from the left-hand side of the window. The Windows XP New Connection Wizard will appear on the screen.
4. First click Next to begin the new connection wizard.
5. Select Setup Advanced Connection‘ item from the list and click Next.
6. Choose the ‘Accept Incoming Connections‘ option and click Next.
7. On the ‘Devices for Incoming Connections’, click Next.
8. Choose an option on the “Allow Incoming Connections“and click Next.
9. On the ‘Users Permissions’page, select all of the users you would like to allow VPN access to this computer.  Important: Every user that you wish to give VPN access, must have a Windows Login on both computers with the SAME login name and password.
10. Click on the Next button.
11. On the Network Software page, select TCP/IP and click on Properties.
12. On the Incoming TCP/IP Properties page, select Allow Callers to Access my Local Area if you want remote users to also access the LAN.
13. Click on the option that determines how the remote computer will get its IP address for this VPN connection.   Make sure the IP scheme is the same as on your server.
14. Click OK.
15. If the VPN server is behind a router, Port Mapping will need to be done on the router. Standard port usage is port number 1723 for PPTP.  You might also have to configure your router for ‘PPTP Passthrough’.  Port usage for IPSec is 500, 50-51.  These ports will have to be forwarded to the VPN server’s IP.

Microsoft has excellent technical articles about setting up VPN networks <here> and <here>.

Once you have VPN access configured to your RavTrack PC, you will need to connect to it from the remote client computer.  The remote client computer will need to have a VPN connection created on it.  Follow the steps below to create an VPN connection on the client computer.

Configure a VPN connection from a client computer

To set up a VPN connection on the client computer, follow these steps:

1. On the computer that is running Windows XP, confirm that the connection to the Internet is correctly configured.
2. Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
3. In Control Panel, double-click on the Network Connections.
4. Click Create a new connection.
5. On the Network Connection Wizard, click Next.
6. Click Connect to the network at my workplace, and then click Next.
7. Click Virtual Private Network connection, and then click Next.
8. If you are prompted to, do one of the following:
   • If you use a dial-up connection to connect to the Internet, click Automatically dial this initial connection, and then click your dial-up Internet connection from the list.
   • If you use a full-time connection such as a cable modem, click Do not dial the initial connection.
9. Click Next.
10. Give the connection a descriptive name, and then click Next.
11. Enter the host name or the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the computer that you wish to connect to, then click Next.
12. Click Anyone’s use if you want the connection to be available to anyone who logs on to the computer, or click My use only to make it available only when you log on to the computer, and then click Next.
13. Click Finish.
14. If you are prompted to ‘connect’, click No.
15. In the Network Connections window, right-click the new connection you created.
16. Click Properties, and then configure more options for the connection:
    • If you are connecting to a Windows domain, click the Options tab, and click to select the Include Windows logon domain check box to specify whether to request Windows logon domain information before trying to connect.

To use the new connection, follow these steps:

1. Use one of the following two methods:
   • Click Start, point to Connect To, and then click the new connection.
   • If you added a network connection shortcut to the desktop, double-click the shortcut on the desktop.
2. If you are not currently connected to the Internet, Windows offers to connect to the Internet.
3. After your computer connects to the Internet, the VPN server prompts you for your user name and password. Type your user name and password, and then click Connect.
4. Your network resources should be available to you in just like they are when you connect directly to the network.
5. To disconnect from the VPN, right-click on the icon for the connection, and click Disconnect.

When you choose to use Microsoft SQL Server for your RavTrack PC database, all of the location information of the GPS tracked vehicles will be stored in the SQL database called “RavTrack“.   You must create this database manually using Micrtosoft’s Management Studio software program, and then assign the user login rights to the database.  RavTrack PC will create the tables within the database. 

The steps to take to setup the RavTrack SQL database in SQL Server 2005 or 2008 are as follows:

1. Using the Management studio, create a database with the name “RavTrack”. You do not need to create any tables in the database, as RavTrack PC will create them the first time it connects to this database.
2. Using Management Studio, create security login accounts for the users that will be using RavTrack PC on the network.  Right click on Databases > Security > Logins > New Login…  to create a new login account for each user. Set the Server Role to “serveradmin”. 
   
3. Using Management Studio, assign the new user login to the RavTrack database.  Right click on Databases > RavTrack > Security > Users . Add User…  to add the new user to the database.  Set the Role Members” to db_datawriter and db_datareader. 

Management Studiois a very good tool to use not only for configuring SQL Server, but also to verify that connections to the RavTrack database are OK.   On any workstation that you feel there is a login problem with the database, login to that workstation with the user name and password, run Management Studio, and try to access the RavTrack database.  If you can access it and list the tables, then the user name and password has the proper rights configured on the server. 

There is a verion of Microsoft SQL Management Studio for every version of their SQL Server program.

Integrated into RavTrack PC GPS Tracking software is a powerful report generating software program called Crystal Reports.

As part of the RavTrack PC installation, a run-time redistribution module is installed on the computer along with RavTrack PC. The Crystal Reports run-time module allows crystal reports to be generated by RavTrack PC, and viewed by the user.  But, it does not include the report editor.  To customize your own Crystal Reports, you will need to by a full-version of Crystal Reports 10.   The run-time module included with RavTrack PC will give you the ability to view the Crystal Reports you generate with RavTrack PC’s report generator.

Installation Problems

There is often an installation error with the Crystal Reports run-time on certain Windows Vista machines.   If during the installation of RavTrack PC you get an error message about Crystal Reports, you can ignore it because there is a simple solution that can be performed after the installation of RavTrack PC is complete.

If, after RavTrack PC is installed and operating, you get an error when trying to open the report generator in RavTrack PC  (View > Reports), then you should manually install the Crystal Reports 10 run-time module.  To do this, perform the following steps:

1. Close RavTrack PC.
2. Download the Crystal Report run-time module from Raveons server at: http://ravtrack.com/downloads/CRBasicVS2008_redist_x86.zip
3. Unzip the file to your local disk.
4. Open Explorer, and go to the directory where the .zip file was stored to.
5. Double click on the  CRRedist2008_x86.msi file to run the installation program.
6. Follow the instructions in the installer, and let it install.
7. Once the Crystal Reports installer has finished, start RavTrack PC, and verify the report features are working.

With release of RavTrack PC vesion 3.1, RavTrack PC supports Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005 and 2008.  By default, RavTrack PC uses Microsoft Access databases and tables to store its inforamtion.  Access is a very good choice for a database when RavTrack PC software is ging to be run on a single workstation, in a vehicle, or when the number of concurrent users is small. 

But, when the number of users running RavTrack PC increases, or when the size of the Log table is large, Microsoft’s SQL Server is a superior product, albeit a bit more complex to install and manage. 

You can download RavTrack PC evaluation copy free as well as the technical manual from Ravoen’s web site at: http://ravtrack.com/RavTrack-PC-Software.html 

If you are going to use a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2008 database with RavTrack PC, then you will need to prepare the SQL Server first, before running RavTrack PC.  Perform the following steps:

SQL Server Installation

1. Install Microsoft SQL Server or SQL Server Express.  SQL Server Express is available from Microsoft at no charge. It may be downloaded at: http://www.microsoft.com/Sqlserver/2005/en/us/express.aspx
2. Use the “SQL Server Configuration Manager” software program that is installed with MS SQL Server to configure the server.
3. Using the SQL Server Configuration Manager, enable the TCP/IP Client Protocol (SQL Server Configuration Manager > SQL Natice Client Configuration > Client Protocols > TCP/IP).
4. Also download and install the “Management Studio” for SQL Server.  The Express version may be downloaded at the same website as the SQL Server Express is downloaded from.
5. Set the default transaction time-out of Management Studio to 1000 seconds (Tools> Options> Designers> Transaction Timeout)
6. Using the Management studio, create a database with the name “RavTrack”. You do not need to create any tables in the database, as RavTrack PC will create them the first time it connects to this database.
7. Using Management Studio, create Login accouts for all users what will be accessing the SQL database using RavTrack PC. 

Troubleshooting:

If you are having trouble connecting RavTrack PC to your SQL server installation, check the following items:

1. Shut down RavTrack PC using FIle > Exit, and restart it.  Whenever the database type is changed in RavTrack PC, you should restart the application.
2. Install Microsoft’s Management Studio applicationon the computer running RavTrack PC.  Use Management Studio to connect to the server to verify that the SQL Server is running properly and accessible from the workstation.
3. Make sure the the TCP/IP Client Protocol is enabled on the SQL Server.
4. Make sure you are logged into RavTrack PC as an administrator with the ADMIN account.
5. Make sure you have purchased and installed an “Unlimited” license on RavTrack PC. The “Limited” version will not connect to an SQL Server.
6. Make sure you created a database on the SQL server named “RavTrack”.  The RavTrack database needs to be on the server before running the RavTrack PC program.  Yse the Management Studio to create the “RavTrack” database on the server.
7. You should have an account on the SQL Server computer with the same name and password as the name/password that you used to log onto Windows on the RavTrack PC computer. If you have not done this, create a Windows user account and password on the SQL Server computer to match the Windows user/password on the RavTrack PC Windows login account.
8. Make sure the rights assigned to the login account are at least db_reader, db_writer, and db_admin.