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VW 2017 Network Setup


obviouslytom

Question

A few weeks ago, I took all of our VW users and changed everything to run off the network so that way all of our settings and libraries would be the same. I did this so that we would have a uniform look across all of our drawings, something that the company I work for never did until I was placed in charge of it. However, I have been running into some annoying issues that I can't seem to resolve.

 

First is that on all of the machines, it takes, for some, upwards of 20 minutes to start VW.  I am assuming that it is making a temp copy of the library files (which are about 1gb in total and growing) and thats why it takes so long. Is there a way to speed this up? Our network here is a full gigabit network and it doesn't make sense.

 

The other issue is that when we all start it up, it asks for an activation every single time. How can I stop this from happening? As of this morning, I took the user that has to wait 20 minutes for VW to start off of the network setup so that he could actually work.

 

I have looked for other threads but didn't really find what I needed in order to solve this issue.  Any help that I can get with this would be insanely helpful not only to me, but to the workflow we have here since I am desperately trying to streamline everything and create that uniform look to all of our drawings.

 

Thanks

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Give us some more details on how you set up the network. Are you using workgroup or project folders or are you simply sharing folders on the server?

 

There has also been a lot of discussion on a different list about making sure that all the users are using the same type of networking, that they always connect with the same network type.  On the Mac, AFP seems to be much preferable to SMB. The consensus on the other list is that you should turn off SMB on the Mac server to force all connections to be via AFP.

 

 

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I was trying to set it up as workgroups, unless project folders would be the better way to go?  I have attached some screen shots of how it is all set up on VW and then the directory on our server.

 

Everyone that uses VW are on a PC based network and the server is Windows Server 2008 R2. All of our company library files are located under Libraries\Favorites and every time I have configured someones machine to use those network folders, it wipes out what is there and puts in shortcuts to them. After that, I have to copy back over the backup copy of those files and it works. 

 

Do I need to remote the workgroup and project folder directory that I have listed in the attached image? Or do I need to add more?

vw 1.JPG

vw 2.JPG

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Hi, 

While I am not sure what the issue is with your setup, I can share our offices setting to establish our workgroup. Our Office runs on both Macs and PC's.

On our server, we have a workgroup folder, but the User Data and Preferences folder is set to be saved on each machine.  I go through and customize each new release of VW and create an office Workspace, that then gets placed into the Workgroup folder under Workspaces, and then each machine can be the same setup and will have access to the same resources. 

Hope this helps.

 

Lisa

VW prefrences.jpg

Workgroup example.jpg

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First off, holy crap! Thanks for the response. I have been going through it and it seems to make sense. I am currently setting it up on my machine before I role it out to everyone else just to make sure it works correctly but so far, when accessing the network based resources, it seems to be going faster. My activation issue has gone away now with creating a separate user file.

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Well I am a little lost on what I am doing wrong. I have followed everything listed above and it works perfect on my pc and on one other next to me. However, there are 2 machines that are giving me a problem because I change the user folders to the user folders I created for them and it goes through telling me its going to copy over settings and whatnot, but then pops up that its going to close and needs to be restarted without every copying any information over.

 

So I go to restart the programs and they crash on startup to the point where I do a clean uninstall and reinstall them, try again, and run into the same issue.

 

Anyone have any thoughts on what I am doing wrong? On my pc, I first changed the "user data and preferences folder" and then after it is done and restarted, added in my "workgroup and project folders" and it works fine.

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I got everything to work for everyone this morning and everything works perfect now. Turns out we had a permissions issue with some of the users since we were not allowing them to write to certain folders and they needed the ability to write to a user folder. Once that was out of the way, the rest of the configurations went smooth.

 

Thanks everyone for the help

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

@orso b. schmid, Can a single Workspace be shared between a Mac installation of Vectorworks and a Windows installation of Vectorworks?

 

I have a colleague who has one of each computer, and two licenses of Vectorworks, and would like have a shared Workspace between the two computers. There is already a Dropbox folder shared between the two computers and a shared Template file is working well, so the sharing connection is good. I just wasn't sure if a Workspace could be shared cross-platform due to keyboard/character differences.

 

Thanks,

-Neil

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On 2/10/2017 at 4:45 AM, orso b. schmid said:

To work in team we need to be able to clean up the mess that accumulates on the user folders, so we need access to these folders without going to each machine: the only way is to place them on a server. From there, a CAD Administrator can maintain them comfortably using VPN from home, in the night.

 

I've noticed this is not ideal if using Dropbox, because the constantly changing VW User Log.txt file ties up the Dropbox syncing queue, getting in the way of VW file syncing.

Edited by Christiaan
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@orso b. schmid I note that you split your office library up into various content folders (and perhaps have multiple files within those folders, although I can't see from your screenshot).

 

What's the advantage of this? I'm curious what you (and others) think of keeping the office library contained within one file instead? (which makes it easier to manage any changes to the Class structure)

 

1097057631_Screenshot2019-09-03at17_08_01.thumb.png.569f7aec5eb2a715ebc4ed1e5752ec74.png

Edited by Christiaan
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Hello Christiaan,

 

the office library should be split from default content, please note the 'forbidden' icon. I consider it a glitch of VW that there is no clear distinction.

Also, we have office libraries for architecture, for rendering and for exposition projects, they are different.

 

We can't have all in one file (all libraries together are 11.5 GB), but we have a file called Basic Set where we keep a subset of the most used resources.

This is also more or less the only file used by those making competitions. They have specific needs which are substantially different than those doing construction drawings.

For them, on the other hand, there is a huge architecture of data-related resources with ancillary items from worksheets to data tags.

 

RM.png

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I have "managers" for dealing with the sheer immensity of such libraries. Below an example of my CAD-Manager Symbols. But I have similar things for most relevant resources.

It is infinitely faster to write a new command and add it in one of the managers, than do anything by hand.

 

 

1443343015_ScreenShot2019-09-08at09_44_02.thumb.png.3456efddc8243afc9a9c0b28e6b176c3.png

Edited by _c_
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