Tasks disappear every day between 4-5 PM PST

[BrianToussaint]

Version: Windchill 12.1

Use Case: I have users that, most to every day experience the loss of items on their Windchill homepage.

Description:

Between 4-5pm PST, will lose items on their homepages.  They had them before and eventually will get them back.  Refreshes, browser changes and incognito modes do not alleviate the issue.  Does anyone else have this issue and a real fix for it?  I have done the steps from CS344602 and CS309967 and it keeps coming back.  Tonight I am going to clear participant cache before that time and see if anyone has the issues.  Really not something I want to do consistently.  And why does time matter and it corrects itself in 20-30 minutes or when they login in the morning?

Below is what the users get when they added the debug to the end of the page:

Tasks: work.listAssignments: Hidden by: removed by role-based check

Workspaces: workspaces.MyWorkspace: Enabled by: com.ptc.windchill.uwgm.cadx.workspaces.WorkspaceSubTabValidator

Subscriptions: subscription.listSubscriptions: Hidden by: removed by role-based check

Saved Reports: user.savedReports: Hidden by: removed by role-based check

Reports: user.reports: Hidden by: removed by role-based check

Checked-Out Work: user.listCheckedOutWork: Hidden by: removed by role-based check

[avillanueva]

So the whole my tasks table disappears. So strange. Odd that its related to a certain period of time of day. I suspect this relates to your system ingesting updated licenses from PTC at a certain time of the day (phone home) and this causes some issues while it settles out. I am just guessing here. I am wondering if you can temporarily suspend or interrupt it to see if things are normal when it cannot run. Not a permanent fix but it would validate my assumptions.

[BrianToussaint]

How would I do that?  I wonder if I can change the time of when it tries to check.  I did open a support ticket and they said there were some issues two days ago on the backend.  Unless there was an issue, it wouldn't explain the other days.

[Marco_Tosin]

If you check this article you will see that it is no longer visible.

https://www.ptc.com/en/support/article/CS438073

They made a deadly disaster with the automatic update of Windchill licenses, globally, because here in Italy there were dozens of PTC customers affected.

I have yet to find time to write in detail what happened.

Anyway, with this update they removed some license profiles and added others, without any notice.

The consequence was that users lost half of the Windchill interface, with all the related commands/actions.

[BrianToussaint]

I can't see it, says it isn't customer visable.

[Marco_Tosin]

Exactly.
If you read the title of the first image of my previous comment, your search result and connect them to what I wrote above, you understand that they are trying to hide something.

It is more than evident.

This is an image taken from Monday night mail

And this is from the day after 

As you can see, they first removed license profiles, replacing them with others, and the next day they came back, in both cases without notice.

To avoid the loss of man-hours again, I blocked the automatic update.

[BrianToussaint]

Gotcha now!  That happened to be when it started again.  It did happen to us last year too.

How do you block the automatic update?  I install my licenses due to the need to split my license count across multiple Windchill servers.

Thanks,

Brian

[Marco_Tosin · Accepted solution]

How to switch license setting to offline or online mode in Windchill PDMLink

windchill wt.licenseusage.WindchillLicenseUtility -SetToOfflineMode -siteUsername wcadmin -sitePassword <wcadmin Password>

[BrianToussaint]

@Marco_Tosin - I just received a call back from tech support and they said that this license check happens every day randomly between 4-5 pm PST and lasts around 20 minutes, which is what my users are complaining about.  This is ridiculous.  They need to allow you to set up the time you want to do that.  Guess I'll be making sure that I turn that off based on suggestions in this thread.

[Marco_Tosin]

@BrianToussaint 

with the “manual” setting you should see something like this

Default is Retrieve license online

[BrianToussaint]

@Marco_Tosin that is what I have.  I wonder why it is still going out then.  I've had to do that because I have different Windchill servers to divide the licenses between.

Brian