I am having problems with autocad file corruption. My users are draftsman and access project files via samba over the network. This problem occurs after a file has been worked on and someone attempts open a file that they were working on. There is no indication of a problem while the file is open and being worked on. But when they try to re-open it, autocad thinks the file is corrupt and it cannot be salvaged. Our autocad dealer has suggested that it could be a problem with the NIC but I have run diagnostics on server and client NIC's and found no problem. -- Bob
> -----Original Message----- > From: Robert A Wooldridge [mailto:bob.wooldridge@edm-inc.com]> I am having problems with autocad file corruption. My users are > draftsman and access project files via samba over the network. This > problem occurs after a file has been worked on and someone > attempts open > a file that they were working on. There is no indication of a problem > while the file is open and being worked on. But when they try to > re-open it, autocad thinks the file is corrupt and it cannot be > salvaged.I had a similar problem for a while. Users were being locked out of their AutoCAD files until they rebooted, and there were occasional instances of corruption. It turned out to be a network problem. The user was on a badly overloaded hub, and dropped packets were causing problems. Duplex mismatches could also do it, but you said you already ran diagnostics, so I assume you've checked that the NICs and the switch/hub are both set to the same duplex settings. (Watch out, some older equipment doesn't auto-negotiate properly, requiring all NICs to be manually forced into the proper mode.) I haven't had a single instance of AutoCAD file corruption since all our AutoCAD users were moved to a fully switched network, for what it's worth. If you can't find a network problem, you might try disabling oplocks on the samba server to see if it helps.
> > > I am having problems with autocad file corruption. My users are > > draftsman and access project files via samba over the network. This > > problem occurs after a file has been worked on and someone > > attempts open > > a file that they were working on. There is no indication of a problem > > while the file is open and being worked on. But when they try to > > re-open it, autocad thinks the file is corrupt and it cannot be > > salvaged.It might help if you told us _what_ version of Autocad. And what version of SAMBA. Right now I have whole offices using cadd without corruption. I have one office that has some file locking problems, thats with 2000i with the civil plugins. It was easily resolved by, (this is just with the civil plugin btw.) level2 oplocks = no Make sure that CAD is configured for a multi-user environment. Use the most current version of samba to, I do. -- *--* Mail: lawrence@otak.com *--* Voice: 425.739.4247 *--* Fax: 425.827.9577 *--* HTTP://the-penguin.otak.com/~lawrence/ -------------------------------------- - - - - - - O t a k i n c . - - - - -
> -----Original Message----- > From: Robert A Wooldridge [mailto:bob.wooldridge@edm-inc.com]> I am using Samba version 2.2.5 on debian stable (but not > debian package, > we just build it). Autocad version is 2002. Our office has about 15 > draftsman and designers who are heavy autocad users. Several > have been > reporting the problem so it does tend to point to the network unless > it's something in the Samba config. I have not looked at the > switches, > just the NIC in the file server. It's a 3com vortex. I have used > mii-diag to check this card. From what I can tell, the -w switch will > look for inconsistancies in the card and this seems to indicate all is > well. I guess I should start thinking about the switches.Mostly, make sure the NIC and the switch agree about whether the connection is full or half duplex. If this is wrong you'll probably have noticed bad file transfer performance (but only in one direction), as well, though. Another dead giveaway is when the NIC reports a lot of late collisions, but the switch doesn't, or vice versa. (Unless you have managed switches you may not have any way of knowing how many collisions the switch is seeing, though.) Turning off oplocks will probably help. Oplocks are unforgiving of network problems. The performance hit probably won't be terrible if you have to run with oplocks disabled. My suspicions point towards a network problem or misconfiguration because we've used Samba 2.2.1 through 2.2.7a with AutoCAD versions 2000i through 2002 without any corruption, except for that one user who had a bad network connection. We only have about five CAD users but they hit the file server pretty heavily, because many of our drawings reference several dozen xrefs each. These kinds of problems can be really difficult to nail down.