And the winner is ....

We recently invited CopiaFacts users to send in a screen shot showing how long their CopiaFacts system had been running continuously.  The winning system had been running an incredible 398 days:

Many congratulations to our winner, Pete Petersen of LexJet,
who sent in the screenshot above, and who wins a free extension to CopiaFacts maintenance for LexJet.   


The CopiaFacts system at LexJet sends incoming faxes direct to employees' e-mail inboxes as PDFs, making it easy for their employees to receive faxes.  It is also used by sales reps sending quotes, sales orders and invoices direct from the LexJet ERP system.  

Pete tells us that their CopiaFacts system has enabled LexJet to eliminate fax machines, increase employee productivity, and enhance their customer experience.  And now we know that it can also run uninterrupted for three hundred and ninety-eight days and counting!

Even though the contest has now closed, if your system can beat this total, please send the screen shot anyway to prove it - we will publish your record and congratulate you here!

File Sharing Violations

Some users have reported seeing a significant number of sharing violations (Windows error 32) reported in COPIAFACTS trace files after upgrading some of their machines, or their file server, to Vista, Windows 7, or Server 2008.

We have tracked this down to a Microsoft issue that affects networks where XP or Server 2003 machines (Windows version 5.x) are accessing the same network folders as Vista, Windows 7 or Server 2008 machines (Windows version 6.x), and the network folders are on a machine running one of the latter group of operating systems.

In these circumstances, a network file closed on Vista, Windows 7, or Server 2008 may not actually be closed on the server until up to 30 seconds later!  Naturally, this causes havoc in our FS file queues, and can affect several other areas as well.  And since we assume it is a real error, CopiaFacts will usually retry each failed file access for the number of times specified in $lock_tries (default 20), which adds unnecessarily to your network load.

The problem does not affect networks where the nodes are all XP and 2003 or all Vista and Windows 7 and Server 2008.  If your network is affected, we strongly recommend that you install the Microsoft Hotfix for this issue: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2625434.