Easy solution to proxy user issue on mac platform

[dp]

Hello everyone,

now i'm very new at Qube and have only been using this for a short time...
but as many others when i had installed everything i had problems with the proxy user and it couldn't find the scene file in my maya project even though it was on a shared file server...

There's different suggetions to add permissions on server, og add the user account, and other startup scripts for automount...

what i did was to go into login item under accounts in system prefs, and then choose the volume to startup mount.. in this case /Volumes/RAID.

This is the path for all our projects...
but it still wasn't working...

so i went to "proxyuser" Library - preferences and found the file com.apple.loginitems.plist..

and there it did show /Volumes/RAID as a startup item, but with one difference

/Volumes/RAID-1

delete the "-1" in a good editor like Tekstwrangler (as it will let you edit the file, textedit does not always allow this)

and bam! it works...
now this may not apply to all mac users having difficulty with the proxyuser issue, but it did do the trick for me and is pretty easy, so i thought i would let you guys know....

[eric]

Thanks for that clever and useful solution.
In general, we recommend that you go with NFS or SMB for render farm mounts because of this issue. I'm not certain, but I can imagine a scenario where 2 jobs run on the same host, but one of them would end up with a mount of /Volumes/RAID-1 and would fail. In the case of proxy mode, it's less likely to happen, but in user mode, you can get some unpredictable results.

[dp]

i'm just worried that our, paths for the projects will change if i go with NFS mounts?


plus, i try to setup our farm to only use all ressources at one job at a time... if possible...

[eric]

Setting up the automounter to mount via NFS should give you a set of stable mounts, as opposed to the ad hoc method you're currently using. You will need to configure them properly on both the desktop and the farm, but if that's not convenient or practical, you can also add some links on the farm to map the mounts into directories that match your desktops.

[dp]

yeah, it seems as i was getting a bit ahead of myself with the ease of my suggested solutions, since it only works on the host machine which i submitted the job from...

instead, i open Textwrangler or any other txt editor and wrote this link

afp://username:password@serverip/Sharedfolder

mark and drag the txt from the editor to a finder window, it will create and finder internetlink file, which mounts the volume correctly when you click it...

put that in login items under accounts -> prefs and it will mount the right way...


I'm still looking in to the automount via nfs but i'll be testing jobs this afternoon, with this method, and if it works as it should, i'll post an update here... sofar with my own account and when i logon as qubeproxy user it works, perfectly...