Clearing Locks in Teamcenter Engineering

A utility that should be run routinely (every hour) in Teamcenter Engineering is the clearlocks command.

The rest of this document explains why it needs to run, a starting point for the frequency it should run, and other options.

This utility can and should only be run by the administration group (infodba), and if this is your first time running it, make sure it is in a sandbox environment.

When you open a NX part in Teamcenter and load the part fully it checks out the file (adds a lock) and releases it when you close the file if everything goes well. The problem is sometimes NX will be shut down non gracefully, the machine is disconnected from the network, or any other abnoralities causes the lock to stay on. The “clearlocks” utility is a very powerfull utility and also very helpfull. If you run this utility with-out any option it will clear any locks that are dead. There are other options that can be very destructive and should only be run when there are trouble locks or other special cases (see the Teamcenter documentation for details).

One option that is also valuable is the clearlocks -nodenames option that shows you the nodes that still have a lock on it. It appears to also clear the dead locks, but is not documented anywhere we can see.

Keeping the locks cleared will make everything work better. You should see less issues with releasing parts, processes, distributed Teamcenter, etc..