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I just have to vent on several products that are simply giving me nightmares in installation and maintenance, and the surprising thing is this is really pricey software, with prices ranging from 10k to 100k usd for an unlimited number of licences on a single network, but before i go into the problems i had with it (and a sensor with an 80 percent failure rate) let me describe an incredibly embarrassing incident that occured to me.

Just the other day the network i managed underwent a failure of (almost) unimaginable proportions, the net work i manage (when not writing or doing whatever is graduate TA’s do) crashed during an exam, not only was the whole thing unexpected, it led to us assigning all A’s to the entire class for that particular class (since they couldnt continue with the examinations) the net work failure is almost certainly due to the software in use, a Siemens Unigraphics CAD program called NX5 , as well as its associated programs, guaranteed this is definitely the most User unfriendly software i have ad in a wrong time and i definitely will have to review this software (which does a lot but also disappoints a lot) the whole thing happened after i had spent roughly 12 hours installing a maintenance update. not counting we had spent close to 30 hours making sure a added on program (a Unigraphics NX Nastran version 5.0) worked, the amount of time spent due to the indecipherable installation commands, if these are the benefits of out sourcing i do hope they stop shipping jobs such as technical writing to places which cant effectively communicate how to install a piece of software (i am an engineer and a developer and i couldnt figure out how to install a piece of CAD software)
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Anyhows back to the fiasco, after hours slaving away on the ungrateful HP computers (God bless them), the examination started on time, by a quarter way into it we started having problems with the license server going down, the lecturer in charge (a perfectly reasonable man or i may have lost my head over the fiasco) restarted te server and came up personally to reboot the computers, i was feeling extremely flustered since the license server had been running all day (at least 6 hours) before the examination started and had not given a trouble to the user’s on it, by the time the server fiasco repeated itself, the lecturer simply scrapped the examination and gave all the students a free set of marks (to their joy)

Fortunately i did not lose my head over the fiasco, the whole situation was …. left alone and i felt more empathy (at the end of the day) for the lecturer in charge (and my supervisor) than i did for myself.

Hopefully in a few other articles i will air my views on several pieces of software by Unigraphics (i fear i may not be charitable) and maybe some from national instruments and MSC, till then cheerios and do leave comments about “natural disasters” you faced in a server environment.