Installation & Licensing

[#1]

When trying to create a deployment image for an Autodesk 2011 product, the process stops with one or both of the following errors:

"Error 1304. Error writing to file . Verify that you have access to that directory."
"Error 2350. FDI server error."

The cause of this is the installation directory has exceeded the 256 character limit of the operating system.

The solution is to shorten the path that you have entered for your Administrative Image location when initially creating the deployment.

Bryce Thelin, Autodesk Product Support

[#2]

Best Practice:  Keep the path as short as possible.

For example, when prompted for the location of the deployment (at the beginning of the Deployment Wizard), instead of specifying something like:

\\My Company\Software\Installations\Deployments\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2011 32-bit English Installation

use something more along the lines of

\\AutoCAD 2011 32-bit Install

Directly share the folder which will house the new deployment, instead of creating that folder a few directories deep in an existing shared folder.

[#3]

This wouldent be as much a problem if the media library did not have file names that were 200 characters long. I think that is completely unnecessary.

[#4]

---

spm5 wrote:

This wouldent be as much a problem if the media library did not have file names that were 200 characters long. I think that is completely unnecessary.

---

COMPLETELY agree.

[#5]

And the problem is even worse,

because when you select at the start of creating the deployment, that you do not want the medial library to be included,

these unselected items still get copied to the deployment location and still take up unwanted disk space on the deployment server and still cause the error.

[#6]

It appears that Autodesk are doing very little in this space to fix this issue. Just tried a Plant 3D 2011 deploy, and the Materials folder and filenames are completely out of control. Some filenames with nearly 100 chars!!

Some firms may have the luxury to shorten the depth of the parent deployment location, however Autodesk are not the only software vendor in the world, and we must have a logical folder naming convention to achieve deployment of 600+ other technical applications. I don't believe this is an unreasonable expectation! Obvously creating folder shares for multiple sites (25+) is impractical as well.

Moving forward, I put it back on Autodesk to have a good look at their folder and filenamng conventions (especially around Materials), and come up with a practical solution that allows us to adopt a "reasonable" parent fdeployment older structure to start with.

[#7]

Windows 7 is not helping also: You have to run the link, created by the deployment "As Administrator" to install the software.

But this user is another session and does not have the (same) drive mappings, so he has to access the location using UNC paths.

Which in our case is something like \\Servername.subdomain.domain\Sharename\Intall\Win72_32bit\AutoCAD_2011

[#8]

Phfft!

2:38 begin extract Inventor 64

4:23 Error 2350 FDI server error

top level directory, windows 7,

[#9]

This solution requires Autodesk to provide the maximum allowable length of the folder path to a deployment.  The users should not have to guess and guess again. 

[#10]

I never understood why this was an issue.  The solution is simple.  \\Servername\Sharename.  Simple.  Why people insist on making UNC shares that are themselves multiple folders deep is ridiculous.  Sure, the physical folder location on the server can itself be many folders deep per company policy, ISO9000, etc., but for crying out loud, share only the last folder for deployment purposes.  Navigating down thru a share to get to an installer is pointless and defeats the purpose of file and folder sharing for ease of use.  Stop over complicating things and you won't have errors.