Networknet.nl

AutoCAD “Out of the Box” is not tuned to perform particularly well in a WAN environment. This tip is about ways to make AutoCAD respond faster in a networked environment.  After implmenting central file serverices with Riverbed appliances the performance and usage of AutoCAD drawing become almost unusable when browsing for a file in Windows Explorer. AutoCAD files were located on a LAN connected file server before and migrated.

Autodesk’s Infamous Explorer Shell Extension
Since Autodesk included the ability to add digital signatures to drawings, they’ve also included an Explorer shell extension that allows Explorer to display signed .DWG files with a different icon than unsigned .DWG files. When Explorer lists .DWG files in a folder, it has to examine each file to determine whether or not it is signed and then display the correct icon. This takes time. On your local workstation’s folders the extra time is insignificant; however on a LAN the lag is noticeable, and across the WAN the lag can be crippling. The Explore lag occurs in AutoCAD File Dialogs as well as just plain Explorer.

By default this shell extension is installed and enabled with any Autodesk product.
To disable it:

• Right-click on any .DWG file and choose “Enable/Disable Digital Signature Icons” from the menu.
• In the Signature Validation Options dialog uncheck the “Validate digital signatures and display special icons” check box. 
• Click OK and Reboot.

Any AutoCAD product install or update will re-enable this shell extension, so you may get to do this more than one time. Anytime your browser access becomes slow, check this setting.

Disabling the the digital signature icon display does not invalidate a drawing’s digital signature. End users are still notified on Open that they’re opening a signed drawing.

Related links:

• AutoCAD in a Networked Environment

If you are experiencing replication problems from one of your domain controllers than there is a quick and dirty way to force the NDTS topology updates. Usually I hit those problems when moving between locations and workstations in my lab and testing environments.

Start “Active Directory Sites and Services” console, locate the site, domain controller and open NTDS settings and remove all connection links.

Start “Command Prompt” and execute repadmin /kcc (Forces the KCC to recalculate replication topology for a specified domain controller. By default this recalculation occurs every 15 minutes.)

Wait for a while and check the replication between your domain controllers.

Related links:

• Repadmin Syntax

Since couple days I am running Windows XP x64 and I wanted to scan some documents with my old Canon Lide scanner which is connected by USB cable on the host. Drivers are not supported in Windows XP x64 and therefore I am using a Windows XP 32bit virtual machine.

After connecting the scanner in Removable Devices I get the message below: 

• Please upgrade your virtual machine to enable high-speed USB 2.0 support for the device “Canon CanoScan”. An attempt will be made to connect this device to the best available host controller. This may result in an undefined behavior for this device

• Shutdown the virtual machine; click VM in the menu and choose “Upgrade or Change version”; follow the wizard and choose VMWare Workstation 6/6.5
• Open the vmx file in Notepad and change virtualHW.version = “6.0″ and add ehci.present = “TRUE” to the configuration.

Getting done is how the virtualization at least helps me here. Scanner is now working.

This morning I started creating and testing a new CSS website template for one of my pending projects. After creating the CSS stylesheet and basic HTML page with DIV’s my content container and footer are not being displayed as they should. For the content div container I assigned CSS property “min-height=400px;”. Using of min height of 400px the website will have nice overview instead depending on the content I enter in the container. The result:

The screenshot was made in Internet Explorer and I checked all my html and css code and everything looks fine. I opened Firefox and opened same URL and the page was displayed as it should be 400px for the content container ;). I am new in the web devolvement and trying to get the basics but this is one example when working with different browsers. Internet Explorer ignores “min-height” and always assign it 8em if the container doesn’t contain data. To fix this problem you will need to define addition CSS declaration for the container.

• div#content {
     min-height: 400px;
  }
• * html div#content {
  height: 400px;
  }

or use another solution

• div#content {
     min-height: 400px;
     height:auto !important!;
     height:400px;
  }

Wow this fixed my first problem.