Common errors

Important Information

In order to provide you with an improved experience and greater flexibility in the way our software is deployed across rapidly changing work environments, we’ve made some changes to our PFAccount and Product Entitlement tools.

PFManager is no longer supported, and cannot be used to download the latest software builds. Please visit the PFAccount Admin Portal for more information.

International character sets

In some cases PFManager cannot correctly work with usernames that contain non-Basic Latin characters. In these cases, please create a new user account on your workstation with a username containing only Basic Latin characters.

PFManager cannot connect to The Pixel Farm's servers

PFManager requires an internet connection for initial setup, managing versions and entitlements, bug reporting and technical support. When setting up PFManager, please make sure that your existing proxy server and firewall allow PFManager to connect to port 443 of

• https://services-thepixelfarm.uk and
• https://pfaccount-thepixelfarm.co.uk

The Service Status indicators will turn green when a connection can be established. You can check the general availability of our servers here.

Initial Setup Failed

This error can occur when PFManager is failing to obtain computer administrator privileges when it is started for the first time, e.g. when an incorrect password has been provided.

It can also occur if PFManager fails to write into its installation directory when started for the first time.

Internal error 1000

This error can appear when PFManager has problems communicating with our support servers, and may be caused (especially on Windows) by changes to your machine operating system during re-installs or updates. To resolve the issue, first quit PFManager and then delete the data folder at /Applications/The Pixel Farm/PFManager/data. After re-launching PFManager and logging in again, access to the support system should be restored (please note - you will also need to re-install PFTrack or PFClean if this occurs).

Install/Uninstall errors

Installing a version of your product consists of first downloading the correct binaries and then unpacking them on the workstation. Application binaries are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). If an error occurs during the download stage of installation, make sure you can connect to AWS servers from your workstation.

Please check to see if your firewall or other network security devices are blocking these downloads. Whitelisting AWS can be a bit tricky since which Amazon site you use can depend on location and can change over time. If in doubt, whitelisting 52.x.x.x should work generally.

The most common cause for an error during installation of a new version of your product, or during removing a previously installed version is missing computer administrator privileges. Usually, a dialog will ask you to grant computer administrator rights to PFManager. If this dialog fails or times out, the installation or removal of a version can not be completed. Please try again and look out for operating system dialogs during the process.

Install problems on Windows 10

If installation problems persist, this may be an indication of issues with file permissions when trying to write data to disk, which we believe may be caused by recent updates to Windows 10. We are currently investigating a more permanent solution to this problem, but in the meantime you can avoid this by changing the location where PFManager stores its installation data.

To do this, please follow these steps:

1. If PFManager is running, close it.
2. Create a new empty directory called pfmanager_data or similar somewhere in your user account (for example, in your Documents folder)
3. Set the environment variable PFMANAGER_HOME to the path of this new folder.
4. Reboot your machine, then start PFManager and try to install your product again

You can set an environment variable in Windows 10 as follows:

1. Type ‘environment’ in the Windows search box. This should bring up ‘Edit the system environment variables’

2. Select the ‘Edit the system environment variables’ entry. In the System Properties menu, select ‘Environment Variables…’ at the bottom.

3. Click the ‘New…’ button in the User variables section.

4. Enter PFMANAGER_HOME as the Variable name, and the path to your new directory as the Variable value. Then click OK. In the screenshot below, we used the new directory pfmanager_data in the Documents folder.