Deltek Cobra – Update server cannot be reached. Please contact your system administrator.
Well this sucks; I am the “System Administrator” and have no clue why the server cannot be reached.
The Error
Evidently this error will occur if something has changed on your system since Cobra was installed.
The Cause
I’ve been wrestling with this one for a while this morning, wondering why Cobra worked fine last week, but not today. Turns out one of our IT folks had changed the computer’s name over the weekend – you’ve gotta love those guys. Once I’d figured that out, I updated the Default data source in the Data Tool thinking it wasn’t seeing the database. No difference, still got the error. Finally I checked the Deltek Knowledge Base and thankfully found out which other file I needed to update to make things right with Cobra. Figured I’d re-publish the solution here so you Google heads can find it too.
The Solution
Locate the DeltekCobraWorkStation.xml file, open it in notepad and update the <UpdateServer> tag to match your system – in my case the computer name went from TENSIX-XP to TENSIX-XP1.
File Contents
C:\Program Files\Deltek\Cobra\DeltekCobraWorkStation.XML
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<Product>
<UpdateServer>\\TENSIX-XP1\CobraWorkstation</UpdateServer>
<InstalledVersion>5.01.517</InstalledVersion>
</Product>
The Cobra Guy’s Suggestion
If the error message had a suggestion or two about what might be causing the problem, it would have saved me a lot of time digging around for clues.
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