2013 - sheet set .dst files become invalid

[Anonymous]

Curious if anybody else is having major issues with sheet sets in AMEP 2013. We use them constantly, and up til now they've worked great. In 2013, we can't get a .dst file to stay valid for more than 2 hours. You can create them & work with them just fine, but once you close & reopen AMEP it says the .dst is invalid, and it creates a new .dst of the same name in the same directory w/ 0kb file size. After that, nothing works... view names, sheet titles, etc., everything that is driven off the sheet set. And of course every time you have to recreate a sheet set, you have to recreate every detail callout, sheet title, detail title, etc. in the set of drawings.

We've installed AMEP 2013 SP1, doesn't make a difference.

All of our machines are Win7 Pro, mixed 32- & 64-bit, with plenty of processor/memory/graphics capability. Our standardization stuff runs off of our network/NAS drive.

Ideas? Any help here would be greatly appreciated :).

[Joshua.Benoist]

NAS drives are not supported hardware.  Files fail to properly read and write on NAS drives.  Our software is not designed for the myriad brands of NAS drives out there.  When you remove the NAS drive and host the sheet set on a server with Microsoft server operating system, these issues should go away.

Hope this helps,

Joshua

 
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[Anonymous]

Well at least it helps pinpoint the issue a bit, so thanks for that .

We've been running Autocad, Autocad MEP, and Revit MEP with the settings/lisp/standards stuff hosted on a NAS drive for over 4 years now, without having any sheet set issues. That was with 2008/9/10/11/12 series of platforms. The problems have only just popped up with the 2013 series of software.

Now we have all kinds of issues related to accessing content that's not on the local machine - block directories, lisp, sheet set files, etc. Note that this is without changes in hardware - the only change has been adding 2013 to the mix.

So what changed with 2013 that suddenly made that an invalid solution? And what is the planned fix?

[Joshua.Benoist]

NAS drives are unsupported.  Unsupported merely means we are not designing our product to be used with it and our product is not tested on those systems.  Does it work with our product and every release?  Sometimes.

Hope this helps to understand.

Joshua

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[Anonymous]

Ah OK I'm with you there.

Very curious what changed in 2013 that made it not work though... since it did before. If I had to guess it'd probably have something to do w/ the security stuff that was implemented w/ SP1... but that's just a hunch.

It's a shame... makes supporting the software much more difficult since you can't just point everything to the network drive. We don't have actual servers on our network so that isn't an option at the moment.

[Joshua.Benoist · Accepted solution]

Without some testing in development, it would be difficult to say for sure what changed.  The file format changed in the 2013 release.

Joshua

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[Anonymous]

OK... thought that this issue was fixed by recreating sheet sets based on the stock 2013 .dst template... but apparently that is not the case. It took a while longer than it did before, but we just had a couple re-create .dst files crash again.

Guess we're waiting til SP2 comes out with a fix, or until 2014 comes out . Between this issue & the startup suite issues, 2013 is borderline unusable.

[Anonymous]

Having a simelear problem here!

Apparently the DST file locks to read-only mode unless you are the orginal author.

All of these new technologies (NAS, Dropbox, ect) are GREAT, and every office I visit uses these to one extent or another, my current office was even using dropbox as 100% of all their file serving and sharing needs...

Its nice that there is no mention of these products not supporting eachother until you try to make them work...

(drop box wont run an a NAS, DST wont run on a NAS or Dropbox)  if it were me, i would never have an office without a true file server of some sort, but isent that what a NAS is?

I find that it is pointless, after trying everything i can to get the *.DST to work on modern technologies,, 

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Having a simelear problem here!

Apparently the DST file locks to read-only mode unless you are the orginal author.

All of these new technologies (NAS, Dropbox, ect) are GREAT, and every office I visit uses these to one extent or another, my current office was even using dropbox as 100% of all their file serving and sharing needs...

Its nice that there is no mention of these products not supporting eachother until you try to make them work...

(drop box wont run an a NAS, DST wont run on a NAS or Dropbox)  if it were me, i would never have an office without a true file server of some sort, but isent that what a NAS is?

I find that it is pointless, after trying everything i can to get the *.DST to work on modern technologies,, 

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I'd point out that .dst's USED to work fine running on NAS boxes. I set my company systems up 4 years ago with no actual servers - just a couple NAS drives for file storage/sharing and things worked great. Everything up through Autocad MEP 2012 worked wonderfully, with only occasional (and extremely rare) file corruption issues. As soon as 2013 SP1 was installed, that all fell apart. Whatever drivers/files/etc. that 2013 shares with 2012 were overwritten by 2013, since now 2012 has most of the same issues as 2013 even (.dst corruption, won't auto-load customizations/lisp/etc.).

The workaround I've got going right now is that when a .dst gets corrupted, you just have to open & save it in a third-party program (SSMPropEditor is the one I use), and after that it works again. You just have to delete the duplicate empty .dst file that Autocad creates when it messes things up.

[Anonymous]

I found the exact cause of the problem.    It has nothing to do with AutoCAD, I am using is a Lacie NAS, running linux presumbeley, the NAS was setting file permissions "X" to user, I think X in linux land means Executiable? I dono, anywayse, it works if you uncheck this!!!!   Anyone who knows linux NAS or Lacie NAS, please help me make this a global setting! I only know how to set read/write permissions globally, and cant find the "X" setting anywhere globally, only on a file per file basis (which means on any new project I have to manually uncheck this to make things work!)