Chronic PDM Conflicts with WatchGuard?

[revenki]

We contracted with a new managed IT services company in February.

They rolled out WatchGuard security to our PCs starting in March. Since then it has been non-stop random and difficult to diagnose problems with PDM. WatchGuard blocking all scripts on the network was easy to fix, but every single WG update seems to disrupt something in PDM, unpredictably, for some users and not others, always with different behavior and affecting different people and different numbers of people.

It's not only scripts. This morning it's PDM crashing File Manager whenever afflicted users try to select a file or subfolder or navigate in PDM using Open File commands in different apps (SW and Excel for example).

Anyone else seeing trouble with WatchGuard, with PDM or otherwise?

[JSculley]

What SW and PDM version are you using?

[revenki]

2021 sp5

[Frederick_Law]

Wow something worse than Sophos.
They block anything and everything by default.
IT need to know their $hit to unblock what the user need.
Get them to fix it.

[JSculley]

2021 sp5

Have a look at the 'Date Created' "Date Modified' and 'Date Accessed' of the files in Windows Explorer. If any of them are invalid (before 01 JAN 1970 or after 31 DEC 3000), there was a bug (supposedly fixed in 2019 SP5) that would cause crashes from the File...Open dialog. Perhaps you are seeing a regression.

[revenki]

It's affecting any files, rather than specific ones.

Latest this morning: users can access files while online in PDM, as long as they don't touch the data card or the preview tab. They can check out, but not check in or undo checkout. They can work offline without trouble, and while offline can access the data cards.

[bnemec]

Can you post screen shot(s) of the error message that the user gets?

Any problems with right click menu in search tool or explorer?

Same behavior when using the PDM Add-in in Solidworks for PDM actions?

No problems with Getting versions of files?

[AlexB]

We had to implement a lot of rules in our anti-virus software so that it would ignore pretty much anything explorer, solidworks, and PDM were doing. Otherwise, it looks at all file transfers, all files being created/opened/closed/executed. This was causing some random access issues and headaches until they were put in place.