Cracking the Vault

Autodesk Support is Hiring!

I just wanted to broadcast to the community that Autodesk has open headcounts for PLM\PDM Support Specialist in multiple regions.

The positions are listed in the Career Opportunities section of Autodesk.com

Search for "Product Support Specialist PLM", and you will see a number of vacant positions in various locations worldwide.

Managing Data with Autodesk Vault

If you haven't seen it yet, you'll love this movie. Get a coffee, crank up the volume, feet on desk, hands behind your head, and enjoy the wonderful world that is Vault.

Implementing Redundant and Distributed Licensing Models On The Vault Server

Note. This article only applies to the following versions of Vault Server

• Autodesk Vault Server Workgroup
• Autodesk Vault Server Collaboration
• Autodesk Vault Server Professional

Vault Server supports multiple Licencing Models.

• Single Server
• Distributed Server
• Redundant Server

For the definition of the licensing models see the "Licensing, Registration & Activation" website.

By default, Vault Server is configured for the Single Server Model. This is defined in the LICPATH.lic file located in this folder

C:\Program Files\Autodesk\ADMS x 2012

(Where x denotes the version of Vault server being used)

To enable the Distributed or Redundant Server Models:-

1. On the Vault server, create a System variable called ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE.
2. Enter the names of the Servers preceded with an @ symbol and separated by a semicolon. Example "@SERVER1;@SERVER2;@SERVER3".
3. Restart the "World Wide Web Publishing Service" (IISRESET)

For more information on Network Licencing can be found in the Network Licensing Guide

Everything is going to change

Everything’s changing this year at AU! www.autodesk.com/everythingchanges #AU2011

New Kids on the Blog - Up and Ready

It's not a parody on the NKOTB, once a teen sensation and a pop band back from the late eighties and early nineties. So if you were looking for an update on their work, you are definitely in the wrong place. Up and Ready Blog is a blog maintained by the team of 5 people with collective experience of 57 years (so far) dealing with installs, setups and configuration of Autodesk products.

If you are one of those who already found this site, you may already confirmed a deep wealth of useful information posted in there. If you are one of those that never heard of Up and Ready Blog, you may want to take a look at it. I’m sure you’ll be pleasantly surprised.  If at any time you have a question related to installation, licensing, configuration, or in general you want to get yourself informed, I would gladly recommend that you check the link: http://upandready.typepad.com/

As you can see this is a great addition to our bloggers community.

Please join us in welcoming and wishing many years of successful blogging to the folks from Up and Ready blog.

How To... Prepare an ADMS Console Backup to send to Autodesk or a Reseller for Analysis

Frequently in Support, to be able to see and reproduce a problem, we might need to ask for a copy of the ADMS Console backup. The main problem with this is that the Filestore can be enormous, making it impractical to upload to an FTP site. To see a problem, we might not even need the Filestore. Furthermore, the Filestore will contain proprietary and sensitive data that you may not wish to distribute outside your organisation. There will be circumstances where the Filestore IS needed as well, but this is much rarer.

So, to send your backup to Autodesk or your Reseller, follow the following steps:-

Create a backup using the ADMS Console (Make sure you untick the "Backup Standard Content Center Libraries" option to reduce Backup size). This creates a folder with this format  "VaultBackup_YYYY_MM_DD_HH_MM_SS_PM"

This folder contains the following components

• "databases" (folder)
• "FileStores" (folder),
• •  Containing "Vault" folders
  • • 000 (folder)
    • FileStoreInfo.fsg (file)
• "BackupContents.xml" (file)
• "BackupHistory.txt" (file)

Copy everything EXCEPT the "000 (folder)" to a new folder.

• "databases" (folder)
• "FileStores" (folder)
• • Containing "Vault" folders 
  •  
    • FileStoreInfo.fsg (file) 
• "BackupContents.xml" (file)
• "BackupHistory.txt" (file)

Graphically, this can be represented as follows

Once the copy is complete, Compress the folder in the ZIP or RAR format and upload it to the FTP site that you should have te details for.

Even without the Filestore the zip file can still easily be several GB big. Therefore, we recommend that you do not use Windows Explorer to upload the files to the FTP but a more robust free FTP client such as Filezilla

Autodesk Forums Are Now Mobile Enable!

Not sure if you noticed but all Autodesk Forums are now Mobile enabled.

 

Autodesk Inventor 2011 Service Pack 1 released.

Autodesk Inventor 2011 Service Pack 1 released. We thank all our customers who identified these issues and reported them to us. These reports give us the opportunity to improve the product and provide you with the best solution in mechanical design. We also thank you for your continued business and for the feedback regarding the content of this update release.

New Manufacturing Blog for Northern Europe goes live!

 Just to let you know...

A new Autodesk blog has recently gone live, aimed specifically at dealing with issues for our Manufacturing audience in Northern Europe.

Championed by Steve Bedder, the Northern European Manufacturing Blog looks like the material will appeal to anyone who has an interest in the various Autodesk technologies that combine to make the Digital Prototyping philosopy, a reality in Northern Europe.

I added a link in the useful links section in the left hand column of the blog

http://autodeskmfg.blogspot.com/

Questions, Questions Questions!!!

Things have been a little quiet on this blog recently and my apologies for that.

The past few weeks\months, DM support has been preparing to deliver sigificant amounts of material to our channel partners to give them the best set of skills so that they can ensure our customers have the most positive experience with Vault as possible. Support staff not directly involved have been manning the pumps and delivering our bread & butter support, so it's a real team effort.

Stage 1 occurred this week where we delivered online training to our Americas channel partners. This was presented and moderated by DM support staff from around the world. Speaking from personal experience, the moderators were certainly busy with all the questions being served by the channel partners. It all appears to have been well received and so next week it is Stage 2 and the turn of EMIA in Munich. The Munich event will not be online but require the physical attendance of the presenters and our channel partners. Moreover, it will be in multiple languages including German, Italian and French as well as English.

We have a lot of ground to cover in a very short space of time, so I'm hoping that the partners will be good sponges and soak it all up :-)