January 4, 2004 Software Timeout

I just tried the link and there is no patch available yet. The web page said to check back after noon EST today for more information.

There is a FAQ page that shows what products are effected. Pro/E Rel 20 and newer, Pro/I 2.0 and newer, Windchill and PTCSetup. They also say that patches will be available after Friday for the most used products first until they have them all covered. They are not aware of any data corruption with this problem, just interprocess communication timeouts.

Since today, 19.12., there is one patch for Pro/ENGINEER 2001 available.

All other patches for the nmsd.exe are still announced.

Just not the Windchill group!

Sorry, I don't understand the column at the top, can someone explain it to me?

Thanks

Mike

Mike,

Go to the PTC website for a full explanation. Briefly:

On Jan 10 at about 1pm EST, ProE/Windchill/Intralink are going to stop talking to each other. There's a glitch in a program called nmsd.exe, located in \i486_nt\nms. PTC is releasing a new nmsd.exe for each product affected, which you will have to download and copy over the 'bad' nmsd.

Some products (R20 and earlier) will not be patched, so they won't work correctly ever again.

Also, this affects ptcsetup.bat. So, old CDs will not install after Jan 10, nor will you be able to run ptcsetup.bat to reconfigure already installed software. New 'fixed' versions of ptcsetup.bat will be posted on the website for each product, which you will be able to put into the loadpoints for already-installed software. New CDs are being created.

There's more to it with Design Conferencing in Wildfire, but again that's all explained on the website.

Also, PTC is releasing the patches to everyone, not just on-maintenance customers.

Regards Peter Brown Jarvis

nmsd takes date from PC clock (said by PTC site).

Probably will be possible to install old releases simply changing PC date before launching ptcsetup.

It is correct?

HI Ale

"Pete" ha scritto nel messaggio news: snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com...

I guess this means that if I want to dowload the patch for Pro-E that I download the one for NMSD? This installation stuff is a litle over my head. I wished I was familiar with it but I'm not.

Thanks

Mike

Ale,

Yes, setting the clock back from Jan 10 will make ProE work correctly. However, PTC strongly recommends to NOT do it because you may cause unexpected problems in other places. Patching is the way to go.

I guess if you are committed to using ProE R20 and earlier, and refuse to upgrade, then you have to set the clocks back.

Pete

too sad. The late V20 builds were the most stable Pro/E versions IMO.

Ptcsetup not working? I don´t mind, since there is no need to re-install unless some ugly system crash occurs which seriously affects Pro/E - such thing did not happen here within _ten_ years (now knock on wood!). Of course - you guessed it - our OS here is _not_ windows.

Now I´m quite curious about what will happen in january, if anything at all.

Is this just another marketing & sales trick to get back "lost" customers? For the ones who left "maintenance" there were "limited" offers already (I wonder if ptc is going to watch carefully who downloads their patches).

Or were Pro/E programmers really _that_ stupid? I can´t believe it.

Regards

Walther

It isn't a marketing ploy. We have set the clocks ahead to test it and sure enough, Pro/I and Pro/E stop communicating when the time is later than that specified in the web site.

PTC is making the patches available to everyone regardless of maintenance status. I don't know about new builds.

Yes, the bottom line is that the programmers were that stupid. This 'bug' has been known for a long time since it involves timing issues between programs that uses the Unix epoch of Jan 1, 1970 00:00:00 as the beginning of time. The time field is limited to 2^30 seconds, which is Jan 10, 2004 at like 1:30 PM. If they had used the full 2^31 power field, they would have had like 26 more years.

One of the comments from another CAD vendor was that their programmers saw this coming and when they wrote their code to fix any Y2K problems, they also fixed this timing issue, since they both involved some of the same routines. If one companies programmers found the bug, why didn't the others?

They were all too busy inventing new funny "features" instead of looking for bugs.

Luckily, the patch availability status for V20 now changed from "Not planned" to

"Not affected" since I last visited that site, so I´d stay with V20 for another while.

Once one has decided to upgrade there´s no way back because file formats are always backwards-incompatible with PTC´s products - and there are _no_ things like some tools for file conversion available:-(.

The best upgrade PTC ever did was V18 to V19 - stability & functionality only.

Walther

Just one comment here... having lived through listening to one CAD vendor talk about little-Indian Big-Indian incompatibilities when PTC products worked equally well on UNIX or Windows, I had always thought PTC programmers were better! It is funny to have a Y2K kindof thing happening 4 years later.

So I need different NMSD files for Pro/Collaborate and Pro/E? I didn't think the Mechanica one downloaded someting different... maybe I should try that again.

-D