How to troubleshoot OTB connections in WinPE

Yes

Summary

This article provides steps to check whether the OTB connection does work or is nos using telnet or putty.

You want to check whether the OTB connection does work or why it isn't working

An easy way to check whether the OTB connection does work or not is using telnet or putty (which has telnet built in)

To do so, follow these steps:

Download Putty.exe according to your WinPE plattform:
x86: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
x64: https://blog.splunk.net/64bit-putty/
Place it into your OSDepot folder (Drive N: in WinPE) or somewhere you can reach from within WinPE.
Start an OS Deploy and if WinPE has been starting do the following
1. Click Command Prompt
2. Start Putty.exe (or Putty64.exe)
3. Enter the name of the Columbus server (use FQDN if requeried - for testing use as much as possible exactly the same writing than you can find in the details log) and select Telnet as connection type
4. Enter the OTB port (default: 24784)
5. Click open to establish an OTB connection to the Columbus server
6. Enter Test or any other string to be recognized in the brainware.log on the server
7. Check the brainware.log on the Columbus server for an entry with "Unknown OTB Command received"

If you get the An Unknown OTB command (see above) entry in the brainware.log OTB is working fine
If you see the server's answer (500-Syntax error, OTB command not recognized.) in PuTTY but don't get the entry in the brainware.log, you look on the wrong Columbus server
If you get a PuTTY error: Unable to open a connection to <Servername> - Host does not exist, your address cannot be resolved by your DNS
If you get a PuTTY error: Network error: Connection refused, PuTTY can resolve the name but the connection is rejected either by IDP, a firewall or something similar

Applies to C7