"Server may not exist..." error message

[Anonymous]

After shuffling around a few shared volumes in our office, we are plagued within both ArchiCAD and Plotmaker by the following error message:

"The server may not exist or it is not operational at this time. Check the server name or IP address and try again."

Some things are obvious, such as the volume of a linked image in Plotmaker was no longer on a mounted. But after cleaning these problems up, I'm still getting the error. Hard to troubleshoot, because the message is triggered by odd, to my mind, events, such as opening attritbute manager, opening 3d window, opening Library Manager, or dragging a drawing in plotmaker.

Neither app seems to provide any clues as to where to look for the bad file reference. I have considered material texture images, recent items lists, gdl references and other sneaky things. Rather than looking through all this CRAP though, I would rather see some kind of report that tells me which reference triggered the error message.

Any ideas?

[Anonymous]

One other thing.

What about the Tmp_01234560....PLN files that ArchiCad can't delete?
What about the Org_01234560....PLN files?
What about the Scratch_01234560...LBK files?
What about the PM_UPD_01234560...Folders from TW?

We've got loads of those on the server.
Is this due to the same problem?

[Anonymous]

This may be a related problem.

When I use my Mac laptop at the offices of my clients who use windows there seems to be a strange permissions error with the libraries. If I load PLA libraries form the server on my PowerBook they no longer work for any one else in the office. They appear to load on the other machines with no reported permissions or access errors, but they load way too fast and none of the parts are visible - just the big dots. As I recall the library loading report does list them all as missing. This does not happen with libraries of loose parts, just PLAs.

[Anonymous]

Found this at Archicadwiki.
www.archicadwiki.com/TechNotes/Connection_failed_error_messages?
I remember this as the solution when AC 8 came, we had huge problems then with extremely long loading times and sluggisch performance in finder windows.
I'll try this and return with some kind of result.

[Anonymous]

I'll try this and return with some kind of result.

Well I'm sorry to say that this had no effect.
But I think I sensed a slight response improvement in Finder dialogs.

[Anonymous]

I had a similar problem when taking files home to work on them. What worked for me was to change the name of the firewire drive (the files were on an external driver) to match the server it was looking for. Do not ask me why this worked, but I was able to open files that would not previously open.

[Anonymous]

It did fix the problem on my machine at work. We've never had a mix of apples and PC, but the problem seemed to start after importing a great deal of dwg files into our plotmaker layout book.

[kevin b]

This fix worked on all our machines in the office (all Macs) as well as my home Mac.

[Anonymous]

Good to hear it helped.

I've only tried it on my computer but now that I see your results I'll do the fix on all 48 computers.
I'll delete all plist files and preference folders as well.

[Anonymous]

Well... So far so good.
4 hours later and no error message.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

[Anonymous]

Hi again!
F.Y.I Check these topic's:

ArchiCad saving error
and
Server "connection failed" warning

These topic's date's back to aug 2005!!!

Our status right now is that we got rid of the "Server may not exist" message after the "DisableCrossPlatformMountingFeatures" thing in Terminal.
But we still have lots of errors like the one's described in the first link.