Graphics Systems SolidNotes

How to Enable the Indexing Server in PDMWorks Workgroup

In my last entry, I discussed whether you needed to use Indexing Server or not. For today, I shall discuss how to enable the Indexing Server in PDMWorks Workgroup.

1. Go to your PDMWorks Workgroup server and click Start… Control Panel… Add or Remove Programs…Add/Remove Windows Components and select Indexing Service.

It may ask you at this time to provide your Windows Server CD.         

                   

2. Open up PDMWorks Workgroup Vault Administrator and go to Search tab. Click the Enable Indexing Service Search checkbox and select Build Catalog. You will see that it will create a count of how many documents are catalogued.

After doing the above steps, you should have a better results when working with PDMWorks Workgroup.

NOTE: This article provided courtesy of Gerald Go, PDM Specialist at Graphics Systems Corporation

Display turned sideways?

Last night, a friend of mine called me at home, desperate for some computer help. His wife was working on her laptop for a report due the next morning, and their toddler got loose and natually banged on the keyboard. No physical damage was done, but the display on the laptop was rotated 90 degrees -- that is, the physical screen was fine but all of the dialog boxes and mouse movements were sideways!

I have to admit I was at a loss. It wasn't something that Windows would do, I thought -- maybe something specific on his laptop hardware. My fiance overheard my conversation and right away she knew what it was - hit the CTRL-ALT-Up Arrow. And it fixed it! I just had to ask her why...

It turns out that some graphics card drivers have "screen rotation" hotkeys. I'm guessing this was conceived for Tablet PCs, but apparently some drivers for regular desktops and laptops have this too. You might be able to go into the driver and disable the hotkeys -- see your documentation for your particular hardware. Anyway, if you run into this, it trying the key combinations listed below might save you some grief. This information might also be useful around April 1st ... :)

Ctrl-Alt-Up Arrow - right side up

Ctrl-Alt-Right Arrow - 90 degrees

Ctrl-Alt-Down Arrow - 180 degrees

Ctrl-Alt-Left Arrow - 270 degrees

Can't get a license from SNL server?

Here is a call I took this week from a customer who was not able to get a license from his SNL server. I will go through the steps to troubleshoot this type of problem, and let you know how we resolved it.

1) Verify that the client PC is pointing to the correct license server
You can verify this by launching the SolidNetwork License Administrator and checking the Server List tab make sure you are pointing to the correct server and port (more on this later). This is also a good time to ping the server and make sure you can connect to it. The customer was able to connect to the server and had the correct port and server name.

2) From the SNL server verify that the server is giving out licenses
The next step is to go to the server and run the SolidNetwork License Administrator. Check to see if you have licenses available from License Usage tab. In this case he was getting a message "Could not get information from server" and had zero licenses available.

3) Check the log file for clues
So we can't get a license on the server. The dongle was in and the license file was read (did i forget to tell you to verify that part?) but we still can't get a license. On the Server Administration tab pick the View Log button, and look at the end of the log to see what's wrong. Here is what his log said.

14:04:14 (lmgrd) pid 8664
14:04:29 (lmgrd) The TCP port number in the license, 25734, is already in use.
14:04:29 (lmgrd) Possible causes:
14:04:29 (lmgrd)    1) The license server manager (lmgrd) is already running for this license.
14:04:29 (lmgrd)    2) The OS has not "cleared" this port since lmgrd died.
14:04:29 (lmgrd)    3) Another process is using this port number (unlikely).
14:04:29 (lmgrd) Solutions:
14:04:29 (lmgrd)    1) Make sure lmgrd and all vendor daemons for this
14:04:29 (lmgrd)       license are not running.
14:04:29 (lmgrd)    2) You may have to wait for the OS to clear this port.
14:04:29 (lmgrd) Retrying for about 5 more minutes
14:04:47 (lmgrd) Still trying...
14:05:05 (lmgrd) Still trying...

So it looks like it can't start LMGRD (one of the processes needed to make this whole thing work). I also looked for the last time it worked in the log file.

17:20:45 (lmgrd) Shutting down SW_D pid=1848 because of signal 15
17:20:46 ((lmgrd)) Loop info: MT:0 VD_HB:20 reset:0clients:0fd's:0
17:20:46 (lmgrd) SW_D exited with status 58 ()
17:20:46 (lmgrd) Since this is an unknown status, license server
17:20:46 (lmgrd) manager (lmgrd) will attempt to re-start the vendor daemon.
17:20:46 (lmgrd) Starting vendor daemon at port 25735
17:20:46 (lmgrd) Using vendor daemon port 25735 specified in license file
17:20:46 (lmgrd) Can't connect to the license server system. Shutdown SW_D failed.

So we have "error 58" -- what is that all about? I talked to SolidWorks and this they told me that this is a odd error and very uncomon. The error is most likely because of Windows DEP (Data Excution Prevention) on the server. This is some mysterious program from Microsoft to protect itself from bad evil programs. So this program is most likely killing the SW_D process needed to run the SNL Manager. What do we do to fix this? Take a deep breath -- we're just about done.

1. Stop the SNL server from the Server Administration tab.
2. Launch the DEP program from Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Performance Settings -> Data Excution Prevention.
3. Add an exception for the two programs LRGRD.exe and SW_D.exe in the install directory for SolidNetWork License Administrator.
4. Check to see if either processess is still running in the Task Manager, and if it is, end the process.
5. Restart the service for the SNL manager and see if you have licenses.

Well, after all that, it worked. So DEP was killing a process and causing the licenses manager to stop working. We prevented it from hapening again, and got everything back up and running. Your case may be different, but these few steps will help you diganose the issue. If you get stumped, you can always call for help too.

To index or not to index…

When Microsoft introduced Windows 2000 Server to the world, it came with a component called Microsoft Indexing Server.  Not many applications used this functionality.  Starting with SolidWorks 2007, however, PDMWorks Workgroup 2007 gives you the option of taking advantage of this component.  Microsoft Indexing Server allows applications to have their own “index card.”  This means that it allows applications to create their own special index entries to let them search any data or vault content more quickly.  Thus, the question for you as a CAD administrator is “Do I need this?” and “How will this benefit us our engineers and users

The Good

• The main benefit of utilizing Microsoft Indexing Server is searching performance and creation of an assembly and component list when you check in or check out an assembly.  This is done by letting the PDMWorks Workgroup Server create “index cards” directories.  Thus, whenever a user would like to search for files, it doesn’t scan each record.  It now refers to the “index cards” directory and give you the answers. 
• It also creates indices of the relationships of the parents and children so that when you check in/out an assembly, it produces the list of the component model children at a faster rate.

The Bad

• I’ve noticed that if I check in a new document into the vault and I immediately do a search of that file right after, PDMWorks Workgroup cannot find the document.  This does not mean that Indexing Server does not work.  It simply means that it takes time to create the indices.  If somebody does a search while the index has not been created yet, they don’t get the desired result.
• I’ve spoken with some IT people who prefer to not install Indexing Server component since it’s an additional infrastructure to maintain.  It will also add to the hard drive space usage albeit not as significant as the actual vault data.

In my humble opinion, the magic number of records to use the Indexing Server is if you have more than a thousand or so documents in the vault, enable indexing searching in PDMWorks Workgroup.

In my next blog entry, I shall talk about enabling Indexing Server in PDMWorks Workgroup.

Note: This article comes courtesy of Gerald Go, PDM Specialist at Graphics Systems Corporation.

Software OpenGL -- What Is It?

Software OpenGL is a SolidWorks setting that will tell SolidWorks to emulate OpenGL on it's own and not attempt to use the OpenGL support of the graphics card driver. In the "old days" this was used a lot on systems whose graphics drivers had no OpenGL support at all; Software OpenGL will automatically turn on when no OpenGL support is detected.

Most graphics cards these days will at least emulate OpenGL and therefore support the use of OpenGL calls from application software like SolidWorks, so that’s why SolidWorks did not automatically turn on the Software OpenGL option even if you're using an unsupported "consumer/game" graphics card.

Software OpenGL as a user-selectable option is useful for troubleshooting graphics card and driver problems, and in addition SolidWorks often performs better when you tell it to ignore the emulated OpenGL support on game and consumer-type graphics cards.

To set the Software OpenGL option in SolidWorks, you must open SolidWorks but have no parts, assemblies or drawings open. Then you can go to Tools > Options > Performance and toggle the option as needed. If you have a file open in SolidWorks when you try this, the option will be greyed out. Just close all data files but keep the SolidWorks program running and you will have access to the checkbox.