I’m not sure if this has ever happened to anyone else, but it used to happen to me quite a bit.  I would receive a model from a consultant and would link it into my project and would need to start adding things just to see if they fit, how they worked with the rest of the design (etc, etc) only to find that you can’t do floor, ceiling, wall hosted families to linked models.  What!?  How am I supposed to work with this?!  Easy, let me show you.

1. You start with your linked model.  This is the easy part.  Notice you can not host anything to walls, floors, ceilings, etc of a linked model… or can you?
   
2. Once you have your model linked in, open (not load, open) the family you want to have hosted to a surface
   
3. Start a new Family, using the “Generic Model face based.rft” template file
   
4. Copy the geometry from the hosted family and paste it into the new template
   

   

5. Modify the geometry how you need it to be  hosted in the project
   (*NOTE!:  Doing this will cause you to loose your constraints, so be sure you have the correct sizes already selected when you copy the geometry!)
   
   
6. Load the new face based family into the project with the linked model.
   
7. Place the hosted component as needed.
   

Tada!  Another simple yet useful tip from yours truly.  Hope you enjoyed!  Have a great day!

-Carl