Running Revit on a WAN

[pdavis]

Has anyone had an issues when deploying and running Revit on a WAN?

[greg.mcdowell]

some delays in Saving To Central (at least when the central file is on another server in another city <g>) but other than it seems to run fine

[crarchitect]

Hi, we have three or four remote users on WAN every day.

You definitely need to use phone/email/web messenger to communicate your Save to Central schedule and Reloading Worksets amongst team members. One major problem is the central file traffic with larger model files really begins to bog down over the net. The resulting dilemma is the main office team is tied up by a remote user doing a slow web-based STC. This happens far to frequently and is a productivity killer. And even with the best planning and discreet work package definition permissions cross overs requiring a remote STC always seem to pop up at the worst time. OOOPS.

Another remote user issue for us is VPN session time out during a long STC. To avoid this problem remote users first set up a constant ping to the server's address just before initiating a STC or RW.

Open a command prompt and type in: ping YourServer /t

This sets up a repeating ping which does use a tiny bit of bandwidth, but it is worth it to avoid waiting and hour for a STC only to find it crashed. Been there done that.

Anyone else have some good tips? The Best Practices for WAN workset sharing deserves careful scrutiny. Any of you Giants of Industry have some nifty file sharing tricks worked out? (you know who you are)

Hope that helps.

[Fred Blome]

From our little 2 man operation:

We schedule STC in off hours to avoid collision or at lunch.
We collide on permission access, but can avoid by segregating work tasks and manually making worksets editable. It's a pain but tolerable.
We use Hamachi to create a VPN and have not had any timout issues. Central size moves around and is currently down to 60mb.

[Mr Spot]

I've been using Revit 9 over a VPN and Remote Desktop connection with great success lately. Definitely useable.

Internet connection at my end is 1.5/256 and server end is 512/512.

[christopher.zoog51272]

I use Remote Desktop via an SSL VPN connection when I work from home. I find the SSL connection to be faster than the passing through the Cisco VPN concentrators on our standard VPN.

It works very well because all that is passing though the VPN is RDP. Plus it's great because you can use your slow home computer to drive you fast workstation at the office. Of course the downside to this approach requires a dedicated workstation server side.

[pdavis]

I would be interested to hear what size projects you are working on.

[crarchitect]

20 megs to 120 megs. Up to four remote users. everyone uses a basic VPN which is not always ideal. the desktop sharing software did work fine, but a recent network repair squashed that ability :(

[pdavis]

How are you dealing with the .rws files in the backup directory and the .txt files in the log directory? When working with worksets, Revit creates a lot of those files and our server space was really starting to take a hit, and Autodesk doesn't provide a method to point to where you want those files created.

We are using robocopy to move those files to a different folder on another drive, then deleting those files. We haven't needed to use those files for recover a file.