NARAC

Frequently Asked Questions for HotSpot

Commonly asked questions about HotSpot, and a place to gather user's suggestions for common workarounds for using and running HotSpot. If you are unable to find the answer here, you may contact customer support.

Q: How can I share user mixture files with multiple users?

Background:

HotSpot output could easily be shared in versions prior to 2.07.2 but with the user based directory structure since version 2.07.2, it now takes a little creativity. This workaround for sharing mixture fiiles uses a Windows 7 command, therefore it is not available in prior versions of Windows. The basic idea is to make a particular user's UserMix directory be a link or shortcut to a centralized directory available to all users.

Implementation:

This procedure only needs to run once per user:
  1. Each user will need to either delete their UserMix directory or rename it for the purposes of saving it. This is necessary as a UserMix directory can not pre-exist prior to the next step.
  2. Open a DOS command prompt (probably running as an administrator)
  3. Run the following command:
    mklink /d C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\HotSpot30\UserMix 'Y:\MyShared Network Mixture Directory'

Note: The "MyShared Network Mixture Directory" represents any directory available to all users. "username" needs to be replaced with a particular user's login ID.

Result:

Each user's UserMix "directory" (soft link) and the centralized "MyShared Network Mixture Directory" are the same directory. If a user creates a new mixture file in his own UserMix directory, all other users see it in their own UserMix folder as well as in the centralized directory.

For more information about symbolic links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link#Limitations

Solution provided by Luther Gibson and Tom Bellinger (Y-12)