Pro/ENGINEER Network

Ah, remember my tweet about problems with the Windchill Diagnostic Utility (WinDU)? Well, apparently, me being the dork that I am, installed the patch on to a Windchill 8.0 M050 machine, which doesn’t require the patch! What a doofus! Oh well, we live, we learn. Lucky I tried it out on a virtual machine before testing on a production server. Boy, would that cause sleepless nights.

If anybody wants the latest (at the time of writing) copy of the WinDU Guide, grab it from here.

Here’s this little tip to make the Pro/INTRALINK 8.0 experience a little better. I do not know why this option isn’t enabled out of the box, and it’s not even a visible option, it has to be manually added.

To add this optoin to the Current View drop-down menu, log on to Pro/INTRALINK as Site Administrator (normally wcadmin). Click on Site>Utilities>Preference Manager. Click on Create Preference and add the following option in:

/ProjectLink/PDMLinkFoldersAndContentsView

Remember to set the value to True and you should be golden!

Hi all, another frantic morning trying to help a customer start their Method Servers, which started but decided that it was too early in the morning and decided to stay closed. Upon further investigation, we traced the cause to an Oracle having a problem with one of the database files (*.dbf). One usually identifies it by looking at the MS logs, which should say something like this:

wt.services.ManagerException: Unable to start all managers.
Nested exception is:
(wt.services.servicesResource/21) wt.services.ManagerException: Unable to start manager: "wt.audit.AuditService" with implementation class: "wt.audit.StandardAuditService"

We then logged into SQL*Plus like thus:

E:\PTC\scripts>sqlplus /nolog
SQL*Plus: Release 9.2.0.7.0 - Production on Wed Jan 7 10:03:44 2009
Copyright (c) 1982, 2002, Oracle Corporation.  All rights reserved.
SQL> connect / as sysdba
Connected.
SQL> shutdown
ORA-01109: database not open
Database dismounted.
ORACLE instance shut down.
SQL> startup
ORACLE instance started.
Total System Global Area  505524628 bytes
Fixed Size                   455060 bytes
Variable Size              92274688 bytes
Database Buffers          402653184 bytes
Redo Buffers               10141696 bytes
Database mounted.
ORA-01113: file 7 needs media recovery
ORA-01110: data file 7:
'E:\PTC\SHAREDCOMPONENTS\OCU\ORADATA\WIND\WINDWCAUDIT.DBF'

This means that one of the *.dbf files is borked. A quick search on Google brought us to the following post on SearchOracle.com. After applying the RECOVER DATABASE; and ALTER DATABASE OPEN; in SQL*Plus, we managed to get the MS started.

And all is well.

A little late but, PTC released a customer support bulletin on December 18th 2008 regarding an issue with the M060 datecode of Pro/INTRALINK 3.4, reproduced here:

Pro/INTRALINK 3.4 M060: Workspace Data Corruption

Several customers have reported an issue with Pro/INTRALINK 3.4 M060 to PTC Technical Support where some user’s Pro/INTRALINK workspace becomes corrupt and not recoverable.  To date, PTC has not been able to determine the scope or scenario that causes this to occur.  Instance that have occurred are sporadic and not reproducible through a given set of steps.  Because of this, PTC has decided to restrict the download of Pro/INTRALINK 3.4 M060 until the scope and resolution are known.  We are recommending customers do not install M060 at this time.  If you have already deployed M060, checking data back into Pro/INTRALINK should be performed regularly to decrease the chance of data loss.

i.e., M060 is hosed for the time being.

Here’s a link to the CSB: Pro/INTRALINK 3.4 M060: Workspace Data Corruption

Ah, perhaps just as a reminder to myself, some system variables to remember when configuring a Pro/INTRALINK 3.X (3.3 or 3.4) client:

Variable Name: PDM_LDB_PATH
Variable Value: <specify a path to a folder to contain the .proi>

Variable Name: INTRALINK_DEFAULT_USER
Variable Value: <used to let the system remember the default user login>

Variable Name: IL_LANG
Variable Value: <used to specify a client language other than that of the host OS>