File read issues related to Collaborate

Hey there! I've been running into some trouble with Collaborate. I'm an employee at a community college, and we're looking to use Collab to allow teams of students to more easily work on games for their classes. From an ease-of-use perspective it seems like the best tool to allow students to work either in the lab or at home, so we're excited to get it working.

Unfortunately, however, we've been having some problems that have resulted in lost assets, blank Inspector values for scripts, etc. These tend to occur either when we're downloading files from the Unity servers or when the Library is being generated. Over the course of opening a large (500mb) project, I'll get at least a dozen of each error if not more. We get two varieties of errors:

Opening file [address]: Access is denied. This is the one that happens during the process of downloading files from Unity.



Opening file [address]: The handle is invalid. This one appears to happen when the Library is being generated, and this happened if we got the files from Collaborate OR if we unzipped a build which was missing its Library folder.



Looking through the forums I don't see many other people reporting similar issues. It's worth mentinoing that I've been testing back-and-forth between the machines on campus and my machine at home, and I'm having no such problems on my own computer so I suspect something on our end is to blame. I haven't found many people online talking about having similar issues, and of the few I found some of them were talking about 'Run As Administrator' fixing the problem, but because students are using these machines we don't want to give them Admin permissions, nor do we want to have to go around manually filling in Admin credentials whenever a student wants to boot up Unity, so we're trying to see what we can change to make Collab cooperate.

In talking with our head technology guy, his best guesses are either there's an issue with our open ports or possibly our firewall setup. We have both a network-wide firewall and one on each of the individual machines, so perhaps one of them is interfering. Where do we start troubleshooting this? What might be the most likely culprits given the errors we're running into? The errors seem to primarily involve metadata files - is this significant?

Hopefully someone here can offer some insight. Thanks in advance!

 

Hey Matt, thanks for the quick reply!

Initially I was pretty sure we weren't using roaming profiles - folders like My Documents don't carry over between new machines, and every time a student logs into a machine for the first time it spins up a new desktop for them. However, I've done some more testing and it seems that the user folders may have something to do with the problem. If I attempted to download a project into the Downloads folder in the user directory I received the errors, but if I instead downloaded it directly into a folder I created on the C: drive it didn't make a fuss at all. I'm gonna touch base with our tech guy about it tomorrow - he's out today - and I will let you know what I uncover.

-Alex

 

Okay, following up with a bit more info.

In order to test things out a bit further I tried downloading the project file into the Public Documents folder, rather than the Documents folder for the logged-in user, and the results were the same - a few dozen errors along the way, culminating in an error in the Collar drop-down that said the download had failed. Testing this on a newly-created folder on the C: drive, however, there were zero problems - downloads and uploads processed successfully without a single hitch.

Where might we go from here? If Unity's own permissions are having trouble, what would be the best way to try to get them to cooperate? Thanks for your continued assistance.

-Alex