Package Build Hangs

Hi List,

We're running Xe on Win 2000 Enterprise Servers, NT 4 WTS with Citrix and no Update. Since September 2001 we have had a real problem when building full packages and I wonder if anyone else has had this and found a solution. I will describe:

We have three enterprise servers and we build the full package over client and all servers at one time.
The client build is usually fine but when it comes to the server build the routine hangs during the transfer of the GBRSPEC.PAK file from the deployment server to the enterprise server \packages\XXXXXXXX\pack directory.
I have managed a workaround usually which involves resetting various status in Build History and resubmitting but this is becoming more and more of a pain and today I am on my seventh restart without a clean build YET!!!!!!

JDE have been no help at all on this and we are now six months on.

Anybody out there had this problem, please help a struggling CNC novice.

Many thanks,
Andrew

Xe sp18.1 (installed a week ago and no help), XeUpdate0, Win2000 Enterprise, NT4WTS + Citrix

Hi Andrew,

looks like an interesting problem. I have no experience building server
packages for several severs at a time. As this is a not too common situation
maybe the problem lies here. Gbrspec.pak is quite big. Maybe OW gets lost
while transfering this one file to several places at the same time.
Do you have problems building a client/server package for one server only?
If not, it would be a much quicker work-around building the package for only
one server and then copying the package to the others (I assume all servers
are NT/W2K).

Let us know what you find.

Thanks, Gerd

Re: RE: Package Build Hangs

Thanks for the tips Gerd. The same thing happens when we try it to just One Server although not as often. During the build, JDE only processes one server at a time anyway and so the 'getting lost' idea may not apply.

It is more like it just gets fed up and stops transmitting and then everything just hangs until some arbitrary point where the process will close.

It may be the answer though that we build for one and copy - I just wanted to avoid the manual steps and let JDE do the work as it is supposed to.

Re: RE: Package Build Hangs

We run two enterprise servers and build for both at the same time as the client. The only problems we've had at the copy stage have been down to disk space (D'oh!). We found early on that it could take a surprisingly long time to copy stuff some times (all our servers are in a single rack with gigabit links and it takes time).

Does it start to copy the new file in?

I, too, would ask you to check on disk space. Are you doing any disk space cleanup before "restarting" your build? Could be one or more file systems on your ES are filling up.

Have seen full package builds hang when being built from a Win2k Client and the Deployment server is running NT4.0.

As KMcCrary points out, there is a known issue with server package builds if you are doing them from a Win2K client, and an NT 4.0 Deployment Server.

Where are you doing your builds from? Launching the build from the Deployment Server should help if your servers are all on the same backbone.

I have run into this once before, and mine was something different again. I updated the SP on the Dep Server and AS/400, yet the dep server didn't take the changes and was running the previous version of the SP to the E/Server. This is what caused mine to stop at that point. Re-installed SP on dep server and worked fine.

Paul J
AS/400, Xe, SP16 & 19_C1, Update 3, HTML(Win2K)

Thanks for all the tips. I have tried some of them and we still get the problem. JDE are still working on it and we continue to try out ideas.

We are now running to one server only and it still fails. I plan to DEFRAG all server disks at the weekend to see if there is any kind of disk space issue causing this.

Thanks again to all for your support and assistance.

We had similar problems before. The reasons we got the problem were that there were backup processes would start while the full package build process was still running. After we rescheduled all the backup processes, including the system backups and SQL server backups, on the Enterprise servers and the deployment servers, we have not got any GBRSPEC failed problem since.
You may need to check your entire system to see if there is any process will start or run while your full package build process is running. They may interfere the copy of GBRSPEC files.

Have you tried changing the jde.ini file on the enterprise server to limit simultaneous builds?

Under the

[BSFN BUILD]
Simultaneous Builds=5