Shared menus on network

[JeffPaulsen]

Does anyone put menus on the network to be shared by all users?
What issues will I run into?
What permissions should be set on the shared menu folder?

I recently implemented Land Desktop 2005. I have copied the following menus to a network folder; acad, acmap, acetmain (express), aecco (raster design), land, civil and survey.

I am having intermittent problems where the land, civil and/or survey menus will not load. I try to load them from the network folder using menuload and they just don't load. I can load them from the local drive. As I mentioned this is intermittent and only on certain computers (so far).

I added write permissions to the folder for all users and this seems to help but I haven't tested it thoroughly yet.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Jeff

 

[John Michalik]

We run over a network, but each user has a folder with their login name in a
'profiles' folder on the network as well where a copy of each menu is placed
for the user to modify. Since these menus also control toolbars, etc., it's
very easy for users to overwrite each other with their own preferences. We
also keep a copy of the acad.pgp and .arg files in each folder for the same
reason. Other than that, everything else is kept in the common program
folder structure on the network. One thing you might check as far as
permissions go is to make sure that the 'data' folder is not set to read
only. LDD does NOT like that! We opened up the whole structure and then
gradually cranked down the permissions till we reached a common point
between what we wanted and what the program wanted.

--
John Michalik
Drafting and Design
LDD/CAD Development & Standards
[email protected]

Does anyone put menus on the network to be shared by all users?
What issues will I run into?
What permissions should be set on the shared menu folder?

I recently implemented Land Desktop 2005. I have copied the following

menus to a network folder; acad, acmap, acetmain (express), aecco (raster
design), land, civil and survey.

I am having intermittent problems where the land, civil and/or survey

menus will not load. I try to load them from the network folder using
menuload and they just don't load. I can load them from the local drive. As
I mentioned this is intermittent and only on certain computers (so far).

I added write permissions to the folder for all users and this seems to

help but I haven't tested it thoroughly yet.

 

[JeffPaulsen]

Thanks for the reply John.

We have a similar network structure with a user drive for each employee. We keep the acad.pgp file and a customizable menu on the user drive.

I was hoping to share the acad/ldt menus because we have made some standard modifications to them that we want everyone to use. I am trying to avoid having to copy the menus to several drives.

We keep the LDT data folder on the network also. That folder is read-only except for data\survey which has modify permissions and data\ format manager which has write permissions. This configuration has worked for us for about two years now.

Jeff

 

[John Michalik]

Ok, so basically the same setup. I've thought about putting a common menu
setup as you are talking about before and just having each user have a
partial menu in their own folder for customization. Haven't tried it yet,
things are working good here, so I'm hesitant to mess with it.

data\survey which has modify permissions and data\ format manager which has

write permissions. <

that's basically what I ended up with here too.

Are you getting any type of error messages or is it just flat not listening
to you at all when you menuload? It does sound like a permissions issue if
they load correctly of the local drive though. Sorry I couldn't be of
better help.
--
John Michalik
Drafting and Design
LDD/CAD Development & Standards
[email protected]

Thanks for the reply John.

We have a similar network structure with a user drive for each employee.

We keep the acad.pgp file and a customizable menu on the user drive.

I was hoping to share the acad/ldt menus because we have made some

standard modifications to them that we want everyone to use. I am trying to
avoid having to copy the menus to several drives.

We keep the LDT data folder on the network also. That folder is read-only

except for data\survey which has modify permissions and data\ format manager
which has write permissions. This configuration has worked for us for about
two years now.

 

[John Michalik]

Jeff,

I stole this little bit of info. from Walt Engle in another post. It may
help as you would not have to worry with restriction issues and that should
solve the problem of menus not loading properly. You could blow that folder
wide open and no one would be able to modify those files without physically
replacing them with another. Would this maybe get you where you want to be?
In your case, mine too maybe if I do it, you would put the mnc and mnr files
on the server location and not the local machine, but reading and thinking
my way through his option, I couldn't see a problem there. It sounds like
it would create a static menu situation where the menu couldn't be modified
at all by the user, but if they have their own partial menus, that wouldn't
be an issue anyhow. I'm going to try to carve some time to try this myself
before the end of the week, I'll post back if anything interesting.
each users computer. These are the computer
language files that have been compiled from the mnu and mns files. DO NOT
load the mnu or mns files on users' computers
which can be edited.
Then YOU keep the mnu and mns files safely tucked away. (Better have another
person have access in the dreaded event
something should happen to you and there is need for further
customization).<<


--
John Michalik
Drafting and Design
LDD/CAD Development & Standards
[email protected]

Thanks for the reply John.

We have a similar network structure with a user drive for each employee.

We keep the acad.pgp file and a customizable menu on the user drive.

I was hoping to share the acad/ldt menus because we have made some

standard modifications to them that we want everyone to use. I am trying to
avoid having to copy the menus to several drives.

We keep the LDT data folder on the network also. That folder is read-only

except for data\survey which has modify permissions and data\ format manager
which has write permissions. This configuration has worked for us for about
two years now.

 

[OLD-CADaver]

We've been using networked menus for several years with little strain. We have a basic MNR/MNC then menuload client specific menus, then discipline specific menus, and finally a local personal menu. All except the personal menu are kept in "read-only" network directories. The only people with "write" access to the files are the discipline CAD managers, and IT management.


The setup is stored in client specific profiles that are embedded in desktop client specific icons.

 

[John Michalik]

that sounds exactly like what I am trying to work towards here. My end goal
would be to have a setup something the menu palette toolbar in LDD to where
a user needs only to pick a specific option or button to load the menus, etc
pertaining to that discipline or client. I've been able to take this a
decent way down the road with the project setup within LDD and the tool
palettes, but still not quite what I'd like it to be. Thanks O.C.
--
John Michalik
Drafting and Design
LDD/CAD Development & Standards
[email protected]

We've been using networked menus for several years with little strain. We

have a basic MNR/MNC then menuload client specific menus, then discipline
specific menus, and finally a local personal menu. All except the personal
menu are kept in "read-only" network directories. The only people with
"write" access to the files are the discipline CAD managers, and IT
management.

The setup is stored in client specific profiles that are embedded in

desktop client specific icons.

 

[JeffPaulsen]

Thanks for all the replies. That gives me some things to try. Unfortunately I am in an all day meeting today.

I will try these suggestions tomorrow and post my results back here.

 

[JeffPaulsen]

I have it working now. It seems the problem was that the MNS, MNC and MNR files were out of sync when I copied them to the network drive. AutoCAD was trying to modify either the MNC or MNR when the MNS was being loaded.

I loaded each menu's MNS file while I had write permissions to allow AutoCAD to update the MNC and MNR files for each menu. I then copied those files (MNS, MNC and MNR) to the network drive. I set the network drive back to read-only (woohoo) and everything works.

Thanks for everyone's input.

Jeff