Installation & Licensing

[#1]

At issue is the lag time for opening drawings, plotting, inserting blocks and activating commands from tool plaettes on workstations at our remote offices.  The question: How do you handle your remote offices?  Do you have remote/redundant/mirrored servers at each site?  Do you use custom profiles at each site?  Do you store you libraries and lisp routines on servers or on the workstations?

We have 4 offices.  All our cad files, libraries, Acaddoc.lisp, pgp, etc. are hosted on a server in our main office.  We typically use a common profile for all office, with the support paths pointing to the same file locations on the server.

I resolved most of the issues for one remote user by installing our libraries, lisp routines and everything else onto his workstation.  This meant a custom profile and customizing a set of tool palettes for his use.  I do not believe this to be a good solution; it is a support nightmare.

Our inter-office connections are MPLS data circuits with T1 data connectivity (some bonded).  We have Riverbed devices between the offices.

Thanks

Mitch Mermel

CAD Manager

Matern Professional Engineering

Maitland, Fl

[#2]

Contrary to popular belief (as you are probably experiencing) Riverbed does not work.  We tried it on our nationwide WAN and it does not work.  Your best bet is to use something like server mirroring or Vault so that clients can work locally rather than the network. 

[#3]

I'm sure they work under moderate-load conditions, such as working on some drawing files with periodic open/save/close operations.  But support files which are accessed repeatedly in rapid order really should be on a local server.  We've got our support files centralized on a server, which is automatically mirrored to the server in our other office nightly, and no speed issues.

[#4]

Do you have different profiles for each office? What about tool palettes? Mitch Mermel CADD Manager Matern Professional Engineering, Inc. Celebrating 25 Years of Quality Engineering and Service MEP/FP Engineering Consultants - A Solutions Based Firm mmermel@matern.net www.matern.net Tel: (407) 740-5020 ext. 609 Orlando I Fort Myers I Jacksonville I Tampa Consider the environment before you print this email.