Problem solved. See details about 3/4 way down on Page 2, my post of July 12, 2019, around 10:00 pm EDT.

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My wife is an LCSW -- Licensed Clinical (psychiatric) Social Worker. She works, on contract, for a psychiatric practice. That office uses a service for patient data management, the service is Practice Fusion.

All of the handwritten notes that she writes for each therapy session are scanned to a temporary PDF file on her computer, she then connects with Practice Fusion via an internet connection and uploads the PDF file.

That procedure has worked just fine for her, for years. Until this past week. It has now stopped working. She logs in to Practice Fusion, she can see things that she has done in the past, but she is no longer able to upload a document. At the point in this process where Practice Fusion is supposed to open the PDF file that is to be uploaded, the process stops, with an error message indicating that Practice Fusion is unable to open the PDF file. This error message is not documented in the user manual, nor is there any information on their "knowledge base."

I spent a very frustrating couple of hours yesterday with Practice Fusion's so-called support people. Evidently they have never actually encountered this failure. They wanted to do a screen share, they use Cisco WebEx for this. We tried multiple times, but were unable to establish a screen share connection. They kept trying the same thing over and over again, hoping for a successful outcome, which never materialized. They want to schedule another session to try the same thing again. Insane.

This morning, on a whim, I grabbed a PDF file from my wife's computer, copied it to my computer, and logged on using her credentials. The upload proceeded just fine, no errors.

The two failures on my wife's computer -- unable to upload to Practice Fusion, and unable to establish a screen share session -- sort of hint at some sort of security problem. Maybe.

Both of our computers are Macs. Hers is a MacBook Air, mine is a MacBook Pro, both using OS X 10.11.6 El Capitan. Practice Fusion does not play nicely with Safari, they recommend Chrome for a browser, so that's what we use for Practice Fusion.

Thinking that there might be a problem with my wife's browser, I cleared the history, deleted the Chrome browser, and downloaded a fresh copy. No help, the problem persists on her computer, but the procedure works just fine on my computer, and on Windows computers in the office where my wife works; the problem appears only on her Mac. A scan with MalWare Bytes indicates that her computer is clean.

My expertise is in the C Programming Language and the UNIX Operating System, not browsers and Mac security, and I think that the answer lies in one of those two areas where I don't know a lot.

I do know that we have at least a couple of people on this forum with much more in-depth knowledge of the areas where I suspect that the problem is. Any suggestions would be appreciated, as it is unwieldy for my wife to try to use the computers at her practice, much easier for her to scan and upload her notes from home.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: V-Tail,

I suspect a problem with the PDF file(s). Maybe they are too large, or (more likely) contain non-printable characters.

Is there a chance you or your wife can re-create the PDF files and try again?

quote:

Originally posted by fpuhan:

I suspect a problem with the PDF file(s). Maybe they are too large, or (more likely) contain non-printable characters.

Is there a chance you or your wife can re-create the PDF files and try again?

I don't think that's the problem.

File is not too large, it's 268 KB. The Practice Fusion upload process has previously handled much larger files with no problem.

Non-printable characters should not be an issue, a PDF is an image. This is a scan of a single page of handwritten notes on a paper form. Exactly the type of file that she has been uploading to Practice Fusion for years with not problem.

The same file worked just fine when I did the process from my computer, same file worked fine from the Windows computer at the front desk at her office, same file failed from my wife's computer. So we have one file that works on the upload for several computers, but fails on my wife's MacBook that up until last week has used this procedure just fine, for years. This, plus the fact that a screen share session would not start on my wife's computer despite the Practice Fusion's support person asserting that screen share had been working fine with their clients all day, leads me to believe that there is a problem with my wife's MacBook.

Is there any chance you have Time Machine Backups?
Maybe restore to date before this problem.
regards, Jack

Important data stuff is backed up, but we do not have whole machine backups.

I'll put that on my to-do list, but right now it won't get this problem solved.

I'll have give some thought to wiping and re-installing everything. Should not be too bad on my wife's machine since there are few programs that she uses other than the web-based stuff. Still, I'll need to budget the better part of a day to deal with it.

I'm sure that there's a less drastic way to get the problem solved, but right now I have run out of knowledge.

It sounds like either a "file not there" problem (uploader can't find the file), or a permissions problem (uploader can't read the file). Check, from the command line, these two issues. Is your wife's account an "administrator" account?

Other things to try:

Create an administrator account on the Mac, and recreate the upload attempt in this new account.

Temporarily turn off any firewall on the Mac itself or any router you have between your uplink and the Mac. Make sure that you have a NAT mapping for whatever protocols are used by the file transfer mechanism, and Citrix on your premises router.

quote:

Originally posted by architect:

It sounds like either a "file not there" problem (uploader can't find the file), or a permissions problem (uploader can't read the file). Check, from the command line, these two issues. Is your wife's account an "administrator" account?

Other things to try:

Create an administrator account on the Mac, and recreate the upload attempt in this new account.

Temporarily turn off any firewall on the Mac itself or any router you have between your uplink and the Mac. Make sure that you have a NAT mapping for whatever protocols are used by the file transfer mechanism, and Citrix on your premises router.

Thanks for the response!

It should not be a permission problem, in UNIX-speak, the file permissions are 0644 -- my wife's account has read-write, the rest of the world has read permission.

As far as "file not there," I do not think that's the answer. When I click on the UPLOAD button, a finder-like window opens, I can browse to, and select the desired PDF file. The upload window has two panes: the right-hand pane has fields for various attributes, like patient's name, etc. The field for file name gets filled in by the server process and echoed back to the client (that's us), so that part of the behavior is normal. Same on wife's MacBook, where it has stopped working, and on my MacBook, where it works just fine.

The left-hand pane of the upload window is a viewer: when things are working correctly (as on my MacBook), an image of the file is displayed there. I.e., I can read, and scroll through, the PDF image of her notes -- the image that she scanned in. This is fine on my MacBook, that's the way it was on her MacBook for years, until last week. Now, the viewer pane remains blank, except for a sort of grayed-out error message that says the selected file can not be previewed, although in more than one place, the file name is displayed.

As far as firewalls, etc., nothing has changed on her MacBook, and if we are talking about the router, you have lost me a bit, but I'm pretty sure that the problem does not lie there, for several reasons:

• Same router, wifi network, etc. for both her MacBook and mine, at home. Mine works, hers does not.
  
  
• She can take her MacBook into her office and use their wifi network and / or wired (ethernet) network. She has the same problem there, it worked for years, up until last week.

The preceding points pretty well narrow it down to a problem that is contained in her MacBook.

Oh, I should have mentioned: the problem is only associated with new documents that she is trying to upload. Any files that she had previously uploaded prior to the onset of the problem last week, and there are many, many, files that she has uploaded over the years -- these files are all viewable. She can connect to the server and see anything (everything) that was done before the onset of the trouble, last week. She just can not upload anything new. Not a server problem, since I can log on, on my MacBook using her credentials, and I have no problems. Baffling!

I could post a screen shot if that would enhance the explanation.

V-Tail, what software generates the pdf file? Is it ScanSnap Manager, Acrobat, or something else? Do you have identical versions of that software on both the computers? Occasionally automatic upgrades can generate backwards incompatibility, I think, although if it’s Fujitsu software I’ve not found a problem with that.

If the firewall ON her Mac is turned on, turn it off. Any anti-virus software? Turn it off. Try again. I would suspect something is blocking the port that is trying to be used.

quote:

Originally posted by sjtill:

V-Tail, what software generates the pdf file? Is it ScanSnap Manager, Acrobat, or something else? Do you have identical versions of that software on both the computers? Occasionally automatic upgrades can generate backwards incompatibility, I think, although if it’s Fujitsu software I’ve not found a problem with that.

Hi there. It's the Fujitsu software with the scanner that we bought from you. The file that does work, on my MacBook, is the same as the file that does not work, on Lynda's MacBook.

Short version: this is a two-step process. First, the document -- in this case, a single page of hand-written notes -- is scanned to a local file on the computer.

Second step, a browser (Chrome is the recommended one) is used to connect to the Practice Fusion website, out there someplace in internet-land. Any PDF file on the local computer can be selected to upload. It is this step that is failing on my wife's MacBook, and working just fine on my MacBook.

The file being uploaded is identical on both computers. In step one, it was scanned into Lynda's MacBook. I then reached across our local network and took a copy of that file, from hers, to mine. So it was only scanned once, and there are two copies of the same scan, one in each of our comuters.

quote:

Originally posted by jbcummings:

If the firewall ON her Mac is turned on, turn it off. Any anti-virus software? Turn it off. Try again. I would suspect something is blocking the port that is trying to be used.

I just checked the firewall on he MacBook and found, to my shock, that unbeknownst to me, her firewall has been OFF, all along.

The upload works fine on my MacBook, and my firewall is ON.

As far as anti-virus software, the only thing that either of us has if the free version of MalWare Bytes. "Protection" is a feature of the paid Premium version, not available on the free version (other than the trial period, which is long gone).

Good suggestions from those who have responded, thank you, but we have not found the correct answer yet.

You did try a browser other than Chrome?

I think you've eliminated file perm problems, so that leaves the network. A judicious use of netstat and tcpdump should nail it down.

Never used a Mac in my life.

Divide the whole issue in chunks and analyse the parts individually.

Can you generate viewable .pdf on her machine.
Can you view these with chome, there and using your own computer.
Can you upload .pdf generated on YOUR computer to the company and can they view them?
Can you upload simple txt files or documents with her computer so they can open them?

Must determine if the document generation, the uploading or the viewing at the other end is the problem.
Do they have empty room or file creation ability at the other end. Have they tried renaming the holding folder differently and creating a new one that is empty?

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I do everything on a macbook air. I'm no computer expert by any wild stretch of the imagination, but I do find that there are a lot of things that don't work on Safari. I won't use google for anything, but I do have firefox and that works with a lot of things. I'd try different browsers. It may be that changes in the operating systems or various programs no longer talk to each other, but swapping browsers will help.

That is the ragged edge of my computer expertise. Swapping browsers...

That, and sometimes having pop-up blockers on or refusing cookies causes other sites to not interface. Maybe.

Maybe the practice fusion software is trying to process (parse) the pdf somehow though that doesn't explain why you can upload the same file. Can your wife upload any pdf at all (assuming you can test that)?

I suppose it's possible generating the pdf on your wife's machine is causing the problem. A pdf isn't an image like a gif or jpg it's more like a language in many ways https://web.archive.org/web/20.../Introduction_to_PDF.

Even if this is true I can't think of a way you could determine what's in the generated file that's causing the error.

Can you please take a picture of the screen error and post it here?



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Problem isolated. Chrome browser, which had been working with Practice Fusion just fine for all these years, does not want to play nicely.

Chrome works just fine for Practice Fusion on my MacBook, but no longer does the job on my wife's.

Practice Fusion states that the supported browsers are Chrome (preferred), and FireFox. I grabbed a copy of FireFox on my wife's MacBook, lo and behold, the upload to Practice Fusion now works.

I'm puzzled though, because I trashed her Chrome browser yesterday and downloaded a new copy. I thought that I had cleared Chrome's cache and cookies, maybe I left some crumbs somewhere. I'll try to do a new install of Chrome again, but at least I have identified the problem and we have it working with FireFox.

Whoo hoo! Wife will be happy when she gets home from her office this evening and finds it working.

When you trashed it, it I’m guessing it left all the various config bits in her local Library in her home dir. Thus, you got a new binary, but the culprit remained.

As for the whys in Chrome, Console (for System logs) or the Developer mode in the browser may reveal interesting errors.

Also, when diagnosing web interfaces, a Private window (Chrome calls it Incognito) is great, as it launches with no cookies, cache, etc. Clean workspace.

Didn’t see those mentioned in the thread.

Yes to the incognito window. Depending on the news site it allows you to exceed the five articles per month.

Regarding Practice Fusion and EHR. The stuff you dealt with is a frequent occurrence with the software I am forced to use. They do not bother to tell you that you must use Internet Explorer or an older version of Chrome because they changed something with their software. One system I used would no longer copy and paste records. After a phone call and a half hour they said I would have to use the Control key and C to copy. They remedied that three weeks later. Every night they are down for routine maintenance.

quote:

Originally posted by SigJacket:

When you trashed it, it I’m guessing it left all the various config bits in her local Library in her home dir. Thus, you got a new binary, but the culprit remained.

Also, when diagnosing web interfaces, a Private window (Chrome calls it Incognito) is great, as it launches with no cookies, cache, etc. Clean workspace.

The only file that I saw in ~/Library/Google/ that seemed applicable was the plist. I deleted that and tried again. Same. Steenkin'. Error.

I tried the private browser window. Same. Steenkin'. Error. Really? In a private browser window? This is some strange stuff.

Evidently, I am not finding all of the leftover breadcrumbs that Chrome has scattered in the system. Yes, I did do all of the "Clear History" stuff that I could find in the Chrome -> Preferences dropdown.