Author Topic: File sharing in MacOSX, Linux and Windows  (Read 4464 times)

christine2204

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File sharing in MacOSX, Linux and Windows
« on: October 09, 2007, 07:28:28 AM »
Hi there,

Currently we going to setup a cross platform for Qube to run on. We had 1 MacOSX, 1 Fedora 6, 3 WinXP workers, while the supervisor is Windows XP.

Can you please give some advise on what is the best way of file sharing for this kind of cross platform rendering so that Qube is able to access all the files.

For example I mapped a network drive from my windows server (X:\maya files), I can access the file manually from all my Win and Mac workers, but when I come to Qube for rendering, error message found in MacOSX which "cannot locate file in X:\maya files".

If only Win platform, Qube is running well and able to access the source file.

Once my Mac is turn on, then it will have the error message on searching the scene file.

Please give us some advise on some file sharing technique for cross platform, so that Qube is able to access all the file.

Many thanks in advance.


Best Regards,

Christine

eric

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Re: File sharing in MacOSX, Linux and Windows
« Reply #1 on: October 12, 2007, 06:04:02 AM »
It would be beyond the scope of this forum for me to tell you how to set up file servers for cross platform access. The problem isn't really with how to set up your servers on the different platforms, but the fact that different operating systems refer to files in different ways.

It boils down to Windows has one convention, and OS X and Linux have another convention. When you submit a job from a host of platform, to that of another, your job may not work because either the path isn't in the same format, or the file isn't accessible.

Your first goal would be to make your file server available to all the hosts in your farm. Until we ship a file path translation facility later this year, you will have to set up your shares so that you can take advantage of some similarities between Unix and Windows. Those similarities are very limited, and you would have to implement your own path translation techniques if you wanted to go further.

The easiest setup would be to submit jobs from Windows using UNC paths, and set up links on the OS X/Linux side to handle them. You wouldn't be able to go the other direction, but there is no requirement in Qube to submit a job in the native format. You can certain submit a job containing UNC paths from a Linux host to run on a Windows host.

Here's some suggestions on how to set up the link trickery:

Let's say you've got a server called "server," and on this server you keep a maya directory with projects in them. Let's call the project "default," a and the scenefile "myscene.mb."

So if you want to use UNC, this is what it might look like:

Project: \\server\maya\projects\default
Render:  \\server\maya\projects\default\images
Scene:  \\server\maya\projects\default\scenes\myscene.mb

This is what you'd need to submit a job. Alas, on the OS X side, it won't make sense.

First, you need to mount the drive using NFS or SMB. I'll leave that as an exercise, but what you should end up with is something like this (the underlying structure is what matters, so you can have the mount be whatever):

Project: /Volumes/maya/projects/default
Render:  /Volumes/maya/projects/default/images
Scene:  /Volumes/maya/projects/default/scenes/myscene.mb

Now you need to create a symlink so the path to server will work (you'll need to do this a root or an Admin user on each Worker):

mkdir /server
ln -s /Volumes/maya /server/maya

So if you do an 'ls' of /server/maya, you should see projects.

One small change to how you submit, and you should be good to go:

Project: //server/maya/projects/default
Render:  //server/maya/projects/default/images
Scene:  //server/maya/projects/scenes/myscene.mb

christine2204

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Re: File sharing in MacOSX, Linux and Windows
« Reply #2 on: October 16, 2007, 05:25:46 AM »
Hi Eric,

Many thanks for the advise.

I'll try figure out more


Best Regards,

Christine