Tribal Altium Knowledge

This page is for documenting strange recurring issues in Altium for the benefit of SSI and greater humankind.

Inability to Install .dblibs (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the 2007 Office System Driver)

Many SSI users of Altium cannot install database libraries (used for resistors and capacitors) by default. Installing this driver typically resolves the issue. You may need to uninstall and then reinstall the dblibs after installing the driver before they work.

Migrating from SVN pre-October 2017 to post-October 2017

What's new?

• The SVN is now served from Tabitha, a server in ES3.
• All login credentials are now automatically produced on Tabitha and distributed to SSI SVN users via Slack.
• You will only need to enter your password once.
• The SVN repository formerly stored as a single large repository is now a larger number of independent repositories listed here.

How do I move?

A large number of people were automatically given SVN credentials. If you did not, join #altium  and message @{{{display-name}}}  requesting them. You will need to enter your username and very long and complicated password the first time you try to download an SVN but it will then be saved on your computer. Thanks to HTTPS/SSL, your password is never transmitted or stored in plain form, including when its checked on the server.

Why did this migration happen at all?

Assembla's sponsorship was nominally agreed to for 1 year, which has elapsed. While we still enjoy the benefits of sponsorship, they could be revoked at any time. In addition our sponsored plan only supports 100 users and we very immediately need more - while this could be addressed by purging currently inactive users, that's surprisingly labor intensive and would become an ongoing maintenance task. We're also in talks with others about sharing the Altium libraries around Stanford, which means granting a lot more users SVN access or otherwise needing more control over the repository than Assembla allows.

If you're reading the above and thinking "well, this sounds like it's still probably solvable within Assembla," you're not entirely wrong. However there was some negotiation involved when we first approached them and if they refused to expand the scope of our sponsorship and/or revoked it we would be stuck without an SVN hosting solution, as the service is prohibitively expensive. SVN hosting online is an underserved market (and Assembla is the market leader, and as such can price assertively), meaning that there are not good alternatives online. Hosting an SVN ourself is relatively easy (initial setup actually took about 20 minutes), replaces a service that is not truly commoditized, and offers opportunities for growth not available with Assembla.

Tabitha has also been measured as running at 10-20x faster than Assembla, possibly due to being on a gigabit ethernet network on campus.

The breakup of the SVN repository is intended to declutter and save disk space on people's computers. While as-is SVN and TortoiseSVN support selectively syncing specific parts of a repository, the procedure for doing so involves a significant amount of poking around in menus. Altium workshops were a strong motivator for this; it's easier to give people trying to learn Altium a quick download of just the files required to get it up and running than to require them to sync the entire SVN or to walk through how to sync specific parts of it. Breaking out individual team SVNs also means that it's easy to only follow or keep up to date with certain teams. However, authentication is set up such that anyone authorized to use the SVN can sync any project, giving the benefits of having separate repositories without the barrier to joining of needing to be manually added to the project.

Part Linkage Failure Triggering Fatal Error on SSI Library Compilation

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