Resolving locking issues with Revit Server

Hi everyone, hope this New Year brings you all lots of health, happiness and prosperity!

If you’re using Revit Server (why not?), then you’re probably familiar with this particular WIKI article on Model-Level Locks. If you have not noticed, when users report that they cannot access a particular project or synchronize, you also cannot lock the project in the Revit Server Administrator. Without the ability to lock a project, users cannot do anything so it is of utmost importance to get locking-unlocking to work first. Unfortunately we’ve had a couple of occasions where models were in limbo, even though we followed the instructions in the WIKI article.

There are various reasons that could cause a project to break and I won’t try to analyze that. But it seems there is a way to restore balance to the universe once the permissions get sorted out.

First, clear the .lock files as described here. As a precaution, it seems sane to stop the Local Servers in the IIS Manager first, and then stop the Revit Server Autosync service on each Local Server. Alternatively, you could shut them down completely, but as long as you stop the communication between all servers, you should be good to perform some minor “surgery” on the main patient: the Central Server, which has to be up and running. However you also need to stop the Revit Server Autosync service on the Central Server. It seems that in this state, project files that were previously unlockable, can be locked once again, so cycle through them…wax-on, wax-off. If this doesn’t work and you previously deleted the two .lock files for each problem project, go ahead and re-create them manually (notepad is your friend…remember to remove the .txt extension) and try again. I cannot say with certainty whether this is a necessary step since we did perform this task and I honestly don’t know whether to attribute success partially to this fact or not.

When you’re satisfied that locking/unlocking is working, re-start the Revit Server Autosync service on the Central Server. Go back and cycle locking back and forth once again (preferably at the Central Server master node) to ensure everything is working properly. Finally, bring the Local servers back online and don’t forget to restart the Autosync service.

I hope this helps someone in the future. If you have had similar experiences or found alternative solutions (don’t tell me “re-create the central file”: been there, done that!), I would love to hear about them.

Resolving locking issues with Revit Server