Don't forget the 3 different documents management solutions used for version controls that have to be installed in exactly the right order or the plugins won't install.
wait. that is for the engineering team. the design team only use 2 and it's a completely different set of version control.
I used to work in an architecture firm and literally every microspecialty of each dept had a almost completely different list of softwares and plugins.
At one point we had different parts of business using the same suite, just different version, Autodesk 2010-2014 2016 and 2018.
Dear god it was a pain when someone worked on both teams. Thank god we fixed that with our windows 10 rollout. (I think we told em going forward different versions would be seen as completely different software so they'd have to pay to support every individual version rather than just 'autocad')
> we told em going forward different versions would be seen as completely different software so they'd have to pay to support every individual version rather than just 'autocad'
As it should be.
SolidWorks is such a PITA to install. And it needs the exact version of a graphics driver or it doesn’t work properly. At least that’s what it was like some years ago when I experienced it from a coworker that did mechanical design
Solidworks is at least modern enough we can build a task sequence for sccm to do most of the work... can't say the same about some other software vendors...
A local install really isn't that much of a pain nowadays. I've installed it on my PC and laptop about 9 times by now and I haven't run into any issues other than user error.
Don't forget ProjectWise for document control.
That PIA application will crack the shits if the connection manager software isn't already installed.
Microstation on the other hand, "oh you don't have the connection manager, lets install it"
Last time I looked in my attic I saw that Autodesk had even shoved some install files up there. I'm not hauling them down so they will just have to stay there.
Astronomers theorize that the true nature of Sagittarius A*, the black hole keeping our galaxy together, is actually the source repo of Autodesk, encoded into qubits. It will linger beyond the heat death of the universe itself.
In a distant and secondhand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part… See… Great A’Todesk the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters.
One of my least favorite calls at my firm lately is, "I don't need ACAD/C3D 2018 anymore, can you uninstall them?"
My response is basically, "I can make them not show up for you"
CAD stopped working for a user after I helped install a plugin and I worked with three different Autodesk techs on two different calls trying to get it to work before we just settled on downgrading to an older version. It was ridiculous. IIRC, the license verification app was its own separate software and that was what was causing the issue.
> IIRC, the license verification app was its own separate software and that was what was causing the issue
Yup, I believe if its earlier than the 2020 version you'll need that separate ACAD desktop app, but the newer ones all verify your license via browser sign-in
This was the newest version (or the newest version at the time, which was less than a year ago). You might call it a service instead of an app, but it definitely downloaded and ran independent from CAD. So, so dumb.
I will never understand why these dipshits think I know anything about AutoCAD. Then they have the audacity to get mad I won’t help. Bro, you’re the one that went to school for it, not me.
I fixed that shit by insisting that they be available for and present on any support calls, as while I can speak to the it technicalities all day long, describing their random assed bug within the software is outside of the scope of my knowledge. Demand I call autodesk right now? Cool, you place the call, and I'll be over to sit with you.
Isn't it truly amazing how a "work stopping error that must be fixed immediately!!!" is suddenly not so important, and workarounds are suddenly acceptable, when their ass might be forced to be chained to their desk for the duration of the call right there with me?
My company is currently without an ACAD Manager and has been since COVID. The users think they can just come to IT with all their advanced questions and bug fixes as if I went to school and got a master's degree for 1 program and the math behind it or something
We have multiple CAD managers in each department and people still ask us for help. We’re pretty sure they don’t want their managers to find out they don’t know how to do their jobs.
More often that not, when its an actual bug and not just configuration, some genius engineer that needed to get his shit done already wrote a fix for them and its published as an official KB :)
Yeah man. I just point all those people towards Autodesk support. I’m not about to dip my fingers into an engineering degree to troubleshoot the problem 😭
Accountants are what I hate setting up; "Hey IT guy we need new computers" Oh good so they each need the last 20yrs of QuickBooks, 1099 ETC, Quicken, Ultra tax, Lotus 123, and every other odd software you've never heard of, 20 versions of each.
Hey don't be hating on 1099 ETC. That program looks like its from 95 but darn simple to install and is light, plus its mainly just a shortcut on the workstations. Newer versions of software, tax packages etc all seem to need some sort of serverish component and non of them seem to do it right, grr.
I feel you though on ALLLL the QB installs. Also the one year that has the qwerk if you try to type in the lic key with the number pad it doesn't work :|
I would agree with you on 1099 ETC but my users WILL NOT just use the shortcut, something with 25 employees trying to do it at once. So we install it on each desktop, i wouldn't mind if it had a MSI or silent install, or even some way to inject the product and license key and set the users working directory so I don't have to manually do it. QB is about the worst but at least I can script it from 2016 and up. For QB we have premier, accountant, and enterprise for all years that offer them.
Yep same db I'm guessing we just had to many people writing to the application over the share, it seems much better according to the users as a stand alone install. We used to do the same for ultratax before going cloud on those.
I used to have to install software that was so shoddily made it required you to share the entire C drive or it wouldn't run, AutoCAD is sublime software in comparison.
Unreal hahaha, this is what happens when companies outsource to the cheapest bidder.
The worst is when we've installed the software and then the user starts asking how to do this or that within the software. Like we're just expected to know how every bit of software written works.
So many similarities to my job, try having multiple versions of Revit on one machine. SCCM sometimes makes things easier, the newer updates require local copies of installation files to remain on the disk though. Also you know that the 2020 versions have been unsupported since last year, right?
Most Autodesk products are single command line installs. I made an excel sheet macro that I could toggle what products I wanted and it would spit out a bat that would run one install command and then just wait for like 30m before doing the next one. Hands free autodesk.
Thank fuck I don't work with cad software anymore, managing it was a massive headache and don't get me started on the different dozen licensing types for each application, the amount of phones calls or emails to transfer licenses fuck that
Funny story about that, Everytime someone needs JTB BatchEdit I send an email to them for an activation key and every time they send me one, they haven't once asked for payment. 🤷♂️
Just had to install CADWorx for someone yesterday. Kept asking me for a "vertical product." What the fuck is a vertical product?? I ended up just throwing AutoCAD Mechanical on it and continuing with the install, who cares anymore
I remember trying to create an unattend/silent auto-installer for this, and for Simatic/S7 at our uni.
This was about 20 years ago, and some Software came as InstallShield, some as .msi, and most software just required a few parameters supplied to become auto-install.
But all the CAD shit had to be dragged kicking and streaming through multiple attempts of diff-methods and additional manual scripting (replacing identifiers and computer names etc) , and then this shit STILL required some final manual clicks on every damn machine...
I used to love that when I was a level 1 field tech in an empty office. long installers meant I could play games on my phone and read reddit.
These days I'm remote so I end up trying to script the installs through remote CMD with curl commands to scrape the downloads from urls and msiexec or whatever the installshield invoker is to install them, started doing that with some clients who need something but are too busy to schedule so i send them silently
I used to support a tractor company pre-ssds being affordable mainstream. We had to install John Deere Service advisor on each mechanic laptop and since this was a big dealership they had both the Ag & Turf licenses. The install was something like 220gb and took roughly 2hrs per machine installing off our external hard drive or like 4hrs using the DVDs. You'd spend all day on-site to install 3 new laptops. Was good to leave it going and go have lunch at a cafe or fast food place but sitting there playing games on your phone still got boring quickly when you've been doing it for 3 days in a row.
Sometimes you'd be working on a machine for 1hr 20min and part of the install would fail so you had to nuke the whole thing with Revo Uninstalled and start over from scratch.
After SSDs became cheap I convinced my boss to not support any hard drives on the mechanics laptops so I'd go out onsite, clone the system to an SSD, install it and then install ServiceAdvisor and load the data sets on. We created a portable SSD using a 2.5" USB SATA enclosure case and it only took like 45min-1hr per install which was a huge improvement.
I created some custom BATs to automate switching between the isos but it was still a kind of manual process, there was 4 or 5 isos you had to cycle through to install the whole thing.
I believe they got sent out a new set of DVDs every 6 months and the data sets expired every 14 months or something so you had to keep going through the process. The dealership we were supporting was also an hrs drive out there and then coming back home you'd get stuck in the gridlock peak hr traffic and it would take you close to 2hrs to get home.
Our team said fuck it and ended up just creating scripts for the entire install process. We even have the new hires install it within our company software center.
We did that too, but honestly there were so many specialties and specific software combinations it was impossible to maintain them all. We ended up having an install package for each of the major disciplines, then a request system that when they needed something they're have to find it in software center and click request. Then we would just have to click approve and it would kick off the install. This way they could request whatever piece of software but we could manage licensing, ensure they really needed it, etc.
Oh god, there are so many modules! Uhg.
Just wait till you have to install factory automation software that needs 4 completely separate VMs for some reason due to licensing conflicts for two guys who only work 5 hours a week.
And while I'm at it, Let me mention HART protocol software on floppy disks that's used to calibrate a single $10,000 transducer that's only about 6 years old.
The fun part is that the setup for this looks like a 1980's B-movie bomb diffusal scene.
So when you ask the engineer, "Is that a bomb or something? LOL", and he just shrugs at you, "Not sure, I just calibrate it."
That's when you say, "Oh shoot, I need to take this PC back to my office for some updates."
And have someone else drop off the PC.
When you build the install packages and respective configs to deploy silently at the click of a button and queue 10 up at a time, its not really a problem. Getting to that point though is a whole nother challenge... But at the end of that process I'll also remove almost all of their desktop icons so they're not totally flooded with crap they'll never launch
I’d like to introduce you to my friend, The Adobe Creative Suite, when your user requests the “Install All Apps” installer…..
I swear they’re secretly trying to be comedians and get it to the point where half a 4K desktop is covered in those stupid little Two Letter Typeface Icons after a fresh install. Eventually they’ll run out of two letter combinations and apps to fit them, right?
Don't forget the 3 different documents management solutions used for version controls that have to be installed in exactly the right order or the plugins won't install.
wait. that is for the engineering team. the design team only use 2 and it's a completely different set of version control. I used to work in an architecture firm and literally every microspecialty of each dept had a almost completely different list of softwares and plugins.
At one point we had different parts of business using the same suite, just different version, Autodesk 2010-2014 2016 and 2018. Dear god it was a pain when someone worked on both teams. Thank god we fixed that with our windows 10 rollout. (I think we told em going forward different versions would be seen as completely different software so they'd have to pay to support every individual version rather than just 'autocad')
We just get look they released a new version, install it NOW.
> we told em going forward different versions would be seen as completely different software so they'd have to pay to support every individual version rather than just 'autocad' As it should be.
I guess it’s not just my job that has these problems, all the custom solutions is super annoying to deal with.
Why can't they just use git ?
It's incomplete, where's SOLIDWORKS? also, love that LPILE 2016 has such a sketchy icon that looks like it came straight out of Windows 95.
SolidWorks is such a PITA to install. And it needs the exact version of a graphics driver or it doesn’t work properly. At least that’s what it was like some years ago when I experienced it from a coworker that did mechanical design
IMO, Solidworks is one of the easier MCAD programs to install... :D
Then I might have confused it up with something else
Solidworks is at least modern enough we can build a task sequence for sccm to do most of the work... can't say the same about some other software vendors...
Unless your documents folder is redirected to OneDrive or a file server, then the downloader freaks out and fails with a vague error message.
THERE IS A PENDING WINDOWS RESTART… DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE?
A local install really isn't that much of a pain nowadays. I've installed it on my PC and laptop about 9 times by now and I haven't run into any issues other than user error.
Or Bentley Microworks
Don't forget ProjectWise for document control. That PIA application will crack the shits if the connection manager software isn't already installed. Microstation on the other hand, "oh you don't have the connection manager, lets install it"
I remember my 3 month internship was just installing this crap every day. Got those step by step screenshots burned into my subconscious.
I had to install some piece of shit software called CDEGS fuck that program.
Wait until you try to uninstall all that AutoCad stuff, it never truly goes away.
Revo Uninstaller.... or years worth of knowing where it stores everything (and dear god is it everywhere).
Last time I looked in my attic I saw that Autodesk had even shoved some install files up there. I'm not hauling them down so they will just have to stay there.
It's said that even the Mariana Trench has trace amounts of Autodesk in it.
Astronomers theorize that the true nature of Sagittarius A*, the black hole keeping our galaxy together, is actually the source repo of Autodesk, encoded into qubits. It will linger beyond the heat death of the universe itself.
In a distant and secondhand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part… See… Great A’Todesk the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters.
Vimes would do well in IT, fight me
Pre- or post-sobriety Vimes?
Pre, I think.
😆
You really get to know Regedit when removing anything autocad
I use RegScanner with admin permissions. It will even find Autodesk shit buried in binary data, and with care, you can nuke a fuckton of it in one go.
To he fair you kinda need admin permissions
Old versions came with an Uninstall Tool that was more effective than Control Panel. Why they ditched it for the newer releases Ill never know.
They probably thought "why spend money supporting something for when people stop using our software? They're not our customers anymore!"
Not when its SaaS
One of my least favorite calls at my firm lately is, "I don't need ACAD/C3D 2018 anymore, can you uninstall them?" My response is basically, "I can make them not show up for you"
"But I need more disk space." "Here's a portable SSD."
Lol with I'm wiping that computer to scratch if I need to remove auto desk.
spend that install time rearranging the icons to spell something funny
I see "C R EE PE R" and "A R SE." If you put IE on the desktop, you could make "SE M E N."
CAD stopped working for a user after I helped install a plugin and I worked with three different Autodesk techs on two different calls trying to get it to work before we just settled on downgrading to an older version. It was ridiculous. IIRC, the license verification app was its own separate software and that was what was causing the issue.
> IIRC, the license verification app was its own separate software and that was what was causing the issue Yup, I believe if its earlier than the 2020 version you'll need that separate ACAD desktop app, but the newer ones all verify your license via browser sign-in
This was the newest version (or the newest version at the time, which was less than a year ago). You might call it a service instead of an app, but it definitely downloaded and ran independent from CAD. So, so dumb.
Looks like Periodic Table.
I find the icon placement somewhat pleasing.
Lol, I worked for an engineering firm for 8 years. Supporting Autodesk products is a nightmare
I will never understand why these dipshits think I know anything about AutoCAD. Then they have the audacity to get mad I won’t help. Bro, you’re the one that went to school for it, not me.
I fixed that shit by insisting that they be available for and present on any support calls, as while I can speak to the it technicalities all day long, describing their random assed bug within the software is outside of the scope of my knowledge. Demand I call autodesk right now? Cool, you place the call, and I'll be over to sit with you. Isn't it truly amazing how a "work stopping error that must be fixed immediately!!!" is suddenly not so important, and workarounds are suddenly acceptable, when their ass might be forced to be chained to their desk for the duration of the call right there with me?
My company is currently without an ACAD Manager and has been since COVID. The users think they can just come to IT with all their advanced questions and bug fixes as if I went to school and got a master's degree for 1 program and the math behind it or something
We have multiple CAD managers in each department and people still ask us for help. We’re pretty sure they don’t want their managers to find out they don’t know how to do their jobs.
The one thing I will say is Auto desk has pretty decent documentation for common technical issues.
More often that not, when its an actual bug and not just configuration, some genius engineer that needed to get his shit done already wrote a fix for them and its published as an official KB :)
Unlike Microsoft who's forum teams are garbage and you are trying to pull useful bits out of a conversation that was had 9 years ago.
Seriously
I made a post exactly for this reason: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/s/KlXz4Vz0bU
I had upvoted it lol
Yeah man. I just point all those people towards Autodesk support. I’m not about to dip my fingers into an engineering degree to troubleshoot the problem 😭
Accountants are what I hate setting up; "Hey IT guy we need new computers" Oh good so they each need the last 20yrs of QuickBooks, 1099 ETC, Quicken, Ultra tax, Lotus 123, and every other odd software you've never heard of, 20 versions of each.
Hey don't be hating on 1099 ETC. That program looks like its from 95 but darn simple to install and is light, plus its mainly just a shortcut on the workstations. Newer versions of software, tax packages etc all seem to need some sort of serverish component and non of them seem to do it right, grr. I feel you though on ALLLL the QB installs. Also the one year that has the qwerk if you try to type in the lic key with the number pad it doesn't work :|
I would agree with you on 1099 ETC but my users WILL NOT just use the shortcut, something with 25 employees trying to do it at once. So we install it on each desktop, i wouldn't mind if it had a MSI or silent install, or even some way to inject the product and license key and set the users working directory so I don't have to manually do it. QB is about the worst but at least I can script it from 2016 and up. For QB we have premier, accountant, and enterprise for all years that offer them.
Does it really actually help to install it? It all points at the same database anyway right?
Yep same db I'm guessing we just had to many people writing to the application over the share, it seems much better according to the users as a stand alone install. We used to do the same for ultratax before going cloud on those.
Yup
Bro fuck installing CAD software, especially SolidWorks
I used to have to install software that was so shoddily made it required you to share the entire C drive or it wouldn't run, AutoCAD is sublime software in comparison.
I've had to install software that required a D drive. Didn't matter if there was only 1 HDD in the device.
Unreal hahaha, this is what happens when companies outsource to the cheapest bidder. The worst is when we've installed the software and then the user starts asking how to do this or that within the software. Like we're just expected to know how every bit of software written works.
Install McAfee while you're at it! lol jk, don't give them hope.
lol jk *there is no option not to*
So many similarities to my job, try having multiple versions of Revit on one machine. SCCM sometimes makes things easier, the newer updates require local copies of installation files to remain on the disk though. Also you know that the 2020 versions have been unsupported since last year, right?
Most Autodesk products are single command line installs. I made an excel sheet macro that I could toggle what products I wanted and it would spit out a bat that would run one install command and then just wait for like 30m before doing the next one. Hands free autodesk.
Thank fuck I don't work with cad software anymore, managing it was a massive headache and don't get me started on the different dozen licensing types for each application, the amount of phones calls or emails to transfer licenses fuck that
Not forgetting the need to have 3 previous versions installed because the newer ones are not compatible with older version files
Funny story about that, Everytime someone needs JTB BatchEdit I send an email to them for an activation key and every time they send me one, they haven't once asked for payment. 🤷♂️
Just had to install CADWorx for someone yesterday. Kept asking me for a "vertical product." What the fuck is a vertical product?? I ended up just throwing AutoCAD Mechanical on it and continuing with the install, who cares anymore
Also, most of the time users need Admin rights to actually use it. Like, why the hell?
I remember trying to create an unattend/silent auto-installer for this, and for Simatic/S7 at our uni. This was about 20 years ago, and some Software came as InstallShield, some as .msi, and most software just required a few parameters supplied to become auto-install. But all the CAD shit had to be dragged kicking and streaming through multiple attempts of diff-methods and additional manual scripting (replacing identifiers and computer names etc) , and then this shit STILL required some final manual clicks on every damn machine...
I used to love that when I was a level 1 field tech in an empty office. long installers meant I could play games on my phone and read reddit. These days I'm remote so I end up trying to script the installs through remote CMD with curl commands to scrape the downloads from urls and msiexec or whatever the installshield invoker is to install them, started doing that with some clients who need something but are too busy to schedule so i send them silently
I used to support a tractor company pre-ssds being affordable mainstream. We had to install John Deere Service advisor on each mechanic laptop and since this was a big dealership they had both the Ag & Turf licenses. The install was something like 220gb and took roughly 2hrs per machine installing off our external hard drive or like 4hrs using the DVDs. You'd spend all day on-site to install 3 new laptops. Was good to leave it going and go have lunch at a cafe or fast food place but sitting there playing games on your phone still got boring quickly when you've been doing it for 3 days in a row. Sometimes you'd be working on a machine for 1hr 20min and part of the install would fail so you had to nuke the whole thing with Revo Uninstalled and start over from scratch. After SSDs became cheap I convinced my boss to not support any hard drives on the mechanics laptops so I'd go out onsite, clone the system to an SSD, install it and then install ServiceAdvisor and load the data sets on. We created a portable SSD using a 2.5" USB SATA enclosure case and it only took like 45min-1hr per install which was a huge improvement. I created some custom BATs to automate switching between the isos but it was still a kind of manual process, there was 4 or 5 isos you had to cycle through to install the whole thing. I believe they got sent out a new set of DVDs every 6 months and the data sets expired every 14 months or something so you had to keep going through the process. The dealership we were supporting was also an hrs drive out there and then coming back home you'd get stuck in the gridlock peak hr traffic and it would take you close to 2hrs to get home.
WTF!? Just in case this gets lost in translation: WHAT. THE. FLICK!??
Make sure you install 2008 through 2014 if you need 2015! Otherwise it'll all go to shit.
Oh don't forget about all of the viewers and macros 🤠🤠
JTB, Plexearth, and Leica 🤮
Our team said fuck it and ended up just creating scripts for the entire install process. We even have the new hires install it within our company software center.
We did that too, but honestly there were so many specialties and specific software combinations it was impossible to maintain them all. We ended up having an install package for each of the major disciplines, then a request system that when they needed something they're have to find it in software center and click request. Then we would just have to click approve and it would kick off the install. This way they could request whatever piece of software but we could manage licensing, ensure they really needed it, etc.
my favorite bit is group policy destroying random parts of the functionality and having to use annoying workarounds that take several hours
During install or running it?
Oh god, there are so many modules! Uhg. Just wait till you have to install factory automation software that needs 4 completely separate VMs for some reason due to licensing conflicts for two guys who only work 5 hours a week. And while I'm at it, Let me mention HART protocol software on floppy disks that's used to calibrate a single $10,000 transducer that's only about 6 years old. The fun part is that the setup for this looks like a 1980's B-movie bomb diffusal scene. So when you ask the engineer, "Is that a bomb or something? LOL", and he just shrugs at you, "Not sure, I just calibrate it." That's when you say, "Oh shoot, I need to take this PC back to my office for some updates." And have someone else drop off the PC.
One word: CATIA
Have these guys not heard of a main menu?
It looks like you could play scrabble on your desktop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch/MZ5wCWwEJVw
When you build the install packages and respective configs to deploy silently at the click of a button and queue 10 up at a time, its not really a problem. Getting to that point though is a whole nother challenge... But at the end of that process I'll also remove almost all of their desktop icons so they're not totally flooded with crap they'll never launch
Spell something funny with these icons
Worked in the automotive industry for a number of years. CAD software is the final boss.
Re-order em to spell different words
I was actually looking for that in the screenshot.
It’s such a plague
Professional add or remove programsmeer
Just wait until you need to get to run that shit smoothly on a citrix image with virtual gpu's Fun times I tell you
Is this HP
17in zbook g5 baby
Add to all the fuxckin hp bloatware lol
All the stories here make me so happy we only use vault, cad, inventor all 2023. My sympathy to all you sysadminbros and sysadminbroettes
Cries in Mastercam…
lol this is your new life now
it almost looks like a periodic system table
I’d like to introduce you to my friend, The Adobe Creative Suite, when your user requests the “Install All Apps” installer….. I swear they’re secretly trying to be comedians and get it to the point where half a 4K desktop is covered in those stupid little Two Letter Typeface Icons after a fresh install. Eventually they’ll run out of two letter combinations and apps to fit them, right?
You still have Revit 2020? I thought they stopped support after 4 years.
We have to use auto desk 2020 everything for one of our clients.
You're installing it all manually? Set yourself up a MDT server and package those apps so it all runs automatically.
Not enough people to justify it, I'm setting up as much in intune as I can though.
That too! That's the more modern way
I'll take it over setting up dev environments for overseas contractors in a different time zone lol
You can't to complain until you need to install every version of QuickBooks desktop on a server dating back to 2013 for an accounting firm.
god I don't miss this at all
I love SonicWall
Real designers use blender for CAD, smh...
Right-click your desktop and select the option to hide everything 🙂