DNS failure?

[Achille Pavlidis]

We are recently experiencing the following problem: Even though everyone is regularly using TW and sending/receiving normaly, at one point somebody is unable to send/receive or reserve and gets an error message of "Unsuccesfull Teamwork Operation". The user appears online, but when checking the connections there seems to be a DNS error, even though the DNS is running and the server address is resolved.
The error goes on for 4-5 minutes and then the user is again able to work properly on TW, even though the DNS error is still on...

Any ideas?

[Anonymous]

had something vaguely similar...
is your bim server machine using a fixed IP?
Your ping results seem to suggest yes but the obvious questions etc.

[Achille Pavlidis]

Yes it has a fixed IP.
And all the macs on the office LAN have the serve's IP adress first on the DNS settings

[Anonymous]

Another obvious question - have you tried with firewalls and anti virus switched off?
Other than that it sounds like you might be entering 'bug' territory, sorry.

[Achille Pavlidis]

Yes tried the firewall thing. I dont have antivirus.

I was afraid Im facing a bug...

[Laszlo Nagy]

Here is the answer I got from the guys at GS HQ tech Sup:

The troubleshoot server connection dialog may not be robust enough to help
the user.

The third section in the following wiki article may be of help:
http://archicadwiki.com/Teamwork/ConnectionProblems

It is possible that the DNS service is not answering fast enough and the
timeout before retry may be the source of the delays.

Also, the issue was been entered into the bug database.

[Tamas Eros]

Dear Achille,

What is the current state of the problem? Could you achieve any improvements?
Regards,

[Achille Pavlidis]

Hi Tamas,

the problem persists as I described it. Could not make any progress.

[Achille Pavlidis]

FYI the problem appears with AC 16 too...

[Tamas Eros]

The Teamwork Communication error indicates that the discovery service of the Teamwork Server is not available for that client. The following causes are possible:

1. The client can not reach the server through port 6005 (default discovery port in the BIM Server preferences) May the port is not opened on one of the computers. You can easily check this with telnet.

2. May you have changed the discovery port in the server but did not set each clients accordingly. The same port has to be set in the Client ArchiCADs in the Work Environment on Network and Update tab.

3. Other network or network configurational error.
The communication via the discovery port uses UDP as well (besides TCP/IP) what has to be allowed on each router, server between the client and the BIM Server computer.
If the server runs on a normal OS not on a server type it can limit the number of the current TCP/IP connections to 128. Increasing this limit to 512 or 1024 could help. In case of OS X we recommend this article: http://rolande.wordpress.com/2010/12/30/performance-tuning-the-network-stack-on-mac-osx-10-6/ which gives a description how to do this.

Generally teamwork functions are independent from the discovery function so they still work when the discovery service of the server is not available.