AutoCAD LT 2012, many users with one project/folder...

[Anonymous]

... and opening a file that someone else already has opened for editing.

The default behaviour would be to give the second user a warning "This file is already opened by user1, do you want to open it read-only?" but this does not occur every time. And it seems, that the problems occur between certain users, not all of them. And when 2 or 3 users manage to open the same file for editing, and then everyone saves the file, everything seems to be OK but the file is not saved.

Clients are Win7 or 8.1 64-bit, and server is 2012 R2. The same problem occurred with Linux/Samba fileserver, and migration to Windows File Server was meant to solve this issue. No help, and it seems that this is not very common problem for what I have been browsing google results and different forums and so on.

Thanks in advance for your comments,

-Olli

[h_s_walker]

Welcome to the Forums

When a drawing is opened it creates 2 files with the extensions .dwl and .dwl2. These tell Autocad that the drawing is open somewhere else.

Have one person open the drawing and see if the files are created. If they are move onto the next user.

When you find a computer which does not create those files, do a repair install of Autocad on the computer and try again.

Also check that the computers which do not create the files have write access to the server. If they don't the files won't be created.

[rkmcswain]

hwalker wrote:

When a drawing is opened it creates 2 files with the extensions .dwl and .dwl2. These tell Autocad that the drawing is open somewhere else.

That part is true, but those files have NOTHING to do with file locking. The O/S controls file locking and has since 1997. Those two files are simply used by AutoCAD and the WHOHAS command. You can delete them, replace them, rename them, etc. at any time with no ill effects.

OP, talk to your IT people. This is an O/S issue and nothing to do with your local copy of AutoCAD.

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I tried with the machines in concern and all of those created the 2 extra files when file is opened. And when another user tries to open the same file, or even the same user opens it twice, read-only warning shows up. So no help there.

As I am the IT Department, what could be done on the server side? This fileserver is new, with no extra settings and why the problem occurs only with some of the users or client computers? The same has happened when user settings put the workstation into standby, or sometimes when the files were open over night. Disabling standby and closing the files helped, but now the problem is during daytime.

Thanks

[rkmcswain]

Once again, forget about the DWL and DWL2 files, they are not related to this problem whatsoever.

Are you on subscription? If so, open a ticket with Autodesk.
In the meantime, what O/S is the server running? Are there any NAS/SAN devices as part of your storage system?

[pendean]

AutoCAD is not getting the required info from the Operating system (or your Server OS) that the files are in use: there is nothing to fix in AutoCAD.

Since this is a new fileserver, what is it, what is the OS, what was the old server and old server OS?

[Anonymous]

All the info is mentioned up there, stock windows server 2012 r2 as fileserver. Same problems were with centos linux and samba, really hard to believe that these two are built wrong the same way, since all other file sharing has no problems, not with linux nor with windows as a server.

[rkmcswain]

My suspicion is that there is still some server/filesystem component not compatible with Autodesk. It's going to be next to impossible to figure out here among peers.

Open a support ticket with Autodesk.

Source?: I've been there and done that.

[pendean]

Is the problem prevalent in other programs? test it.

One thing that can throw off the open files is how they are accessed.  I think they need to be accessed either through a UNC connection or a mapped drive, sort of the same thing.  

And the file needs to be considered 'open' by the operating system, which depends on how the application reads it.  For example, if you access a text file with Notepad, for example, and just open the file, Windows will not consider the file open due to how the application (Notepad) reads the file.  The file has to be held open, per se.

One way to simulate an open file, is to find a simple text file that is over a page long, and from a command prompt:

type \\server\share\long_text_file.txt | more

Then, use the Open Files function in Computer Management and you should see that you have that file open as the 'more' switch forces it to stay open.  This is useful if you think you don't have the rights to see the open files or something isnt' working right.

[rkmcswain]

pendean wrote:
Is the problem prevalent in other programs?

In our case, not that I can recall.

Another "symptom" was the files on the "Model Views" tab of Sheet Set Manager, were not in Alphabetical order and no way to sort.

What really stuck out for us, was... I could use XOPEN to open an xref and make a change, close the xref, back in the parent, I would not get prompted to update the changed file. I would run XOPEN again to verify and BAM.... changes were lost (or never saved rather).

I believe the files were being saved, but that *nux* O/S components were versioning them somehow that Windows/SMB/AutoCAD could not understand. Because the previously "lost" changes might show up a few days later when that DWG was opened. It was a real mess.

[rkmcswain]

I should add that all of our business files (DOCX, XLXS, PDF, and basically everything except DWG) are still on this quasi *nux based SAN/NAS system with no problems. @Autodesk apps were the only ones to have a problem with it.

[Anonymous]

Ok, I tried to make ticket to Autodesk through our reseller, since I could not manage to get one done by myself. I think that this could be something to do with SMB-protocol versions, since some workstations have win7 and some win8.1, and servers have been from 2003 to 2012 R2 and these have different default SMB-versions 1, 2 or 3 ....

But I'll be back if I get some solution to this.

[Anonymous]

No help from reseller or maybe they did not make a ticket or we are not entitled to support. Users are disappointed when whole day work goes since saving the file has not had any effect 😞