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Software specialist Aquarius has warned of a “serious technical glitch” affecting operators relying on GEN2 tachographs.

It said the issue occurs when a tachograph attempts to authenticate remotely with an expired company card that has been left in the hosting rack of a remote download service provider.

Aquarius said that if the system tries to initiate a download using the expired card then the tachograph becomes incapable of remote downloading with a valid card.

However, of more concern is the remote process being shut down completely with no obvious way to reset the system.

Aquarius said that at this stage, the glitch only appeared to affect certain GEN2 tachographs dating from June 2019 onwards.

Guy Reynolds, Aquarius IT director, said: “Our experience and testing have shown that if the company card is left in the rack after its expiry date with or without a new GEN2 card, and the tachograph tries to authenticate it, the system will fail and it will become incapable of remote downloading – even if you try to use a new valid company card thereafter.”

Reynolds said that there were many unanswered questions about why and how this was happening and he urged operators to remove old company cards the day before the last day of the month and then replace it with the new card, which will start working from the first day of the new month.

Aquarius is now seeking to find out from customers if the problem is fixable with a firmware update, or whether it means a complete replacement of the VU.

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