When troubleshooting connectivity issues in SOLIDWORKS PDM, creating or modifying a Windows local hosts file can be an effective way to bypass DNS problems and verify that a client workstation can communicate directly with the archive and database server. This is a plain text file that is used to map domain names to IP addresses manually and allows you to control how the machine resolves server names.
This article explains how to quickly switch the SOLIDWORKS PDM license types on a per-client basis. This method works for both SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional and SOLIDWORKS PDM Standard.
Occasionally, PDM users will experience errors in PDM’s logs or the Event Viewer logs regarding being unable to connect to the PDM server. This error indicates that the SOLIDWORKS PDM Database Server service is failing to connect to the correct SQL server Hostname/Instance the PDM vault is running on.