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Sunday, June 24, 2012

A Visit to the Great White North - Welcome to Edmonton.




This week's blog is only a brief one, due to a trip to Edmonton, Canada for an Autodesk Vault install.  I spent most of today traveling. But I'll likely come back with some new installation lessons to share!

My office this AM.  A Boeing 737.


But on that theme of Vault, I'll give a brief lesson life taught me last week.

That them is: "If it's crazy, and it works, it's not crazy."

I ran into a Vault installation that was crashing when files were checked in from Autodesk Inventor.   The files would start to check in, then BOOM, Inventor would go to ground.

We checked system virtual space, service packs, and server logs.

No smoking gun jumped at us.

Finally a suggestion came out of the blue.  "Test it without publishing a DWF on checkin.  I have a feeling we've got a bad video card."

We were out of ideas, so what the heck, right?

We tried it.

Turning off the DWF Publish option


The files checked in perfectly.

We scratched our heads, and checked the video card.  Sure enough it was below spec.

We never thought of that one!  

So what's that lesson?  Sure, if your Vault is crashing on checkin, try turning off the DWF publishing.  That's the easy lesson.

But the other?  Don't dismiss something too quickly.  We never thought about the DWF publishing, but thankfully, someone else did. 

"If it's crazy, and it works..."

The other thing.  Send in those CERs, or Customer Error Reports to Autodesk, and make sure ot add your e-mail address.

Because it was an astute Autodesk tech, looking at that CER that had the suggestion that solved our issue. The CER showed the crash was happening when the DWF visualization file was created.

So there will be new video cards to be had, and more testing to be done, but we're now on the trail of what caused the issue.

So if you run into your own issues, send in those CERs, and try the stuff that makes no sense.

You might just be on to something...

Have an unusual solution you encountered to an usual problem you encountered?  Share it!  Leave a comment!

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