Slightly OT Q for Steve M.

[Bob Zelin]

Hi John –
I am not Steve M., but I like to make believe that I know 1/10th of what he knows.

If you are using a PEG6 card with a Mac Mini, this means that you are using a Thunderbolt Expansion chassis from Small Tree, Magma, Sonnet, or ATTO.

You open up the System Preferences> Network control panel on your Mac Mini, and you will see SIX independent ethernet ports from the PEG6. You assign each one of these ports an IP address on a different subnet –
for example –
192.168.2.3
192.168.3.3
192.168.4.3
192.168.5.3
196.168.6.3
etc.
Now, on your client computer, you assign a corresponding subnet mask, based on the port you are connecting to –
192.168.2.4
192.168.3.4
etc,

and then you will be able to “connect to server”. In my humble opinion, you should have a unique name and password for every user (as complicated as a name like “edit1” with a password like “edit1”) -they should NOT all be the same username.

That’s it – everything will work.

Having 6 users is not a rediculous amount of users.

Bob Zelin

[John Davidson]

Thanks Bob, I think what I’m trying to ask is, if I want multiple users on the same machine as different login accounts but all being able to access the Mac Mini Server (using the Sonnet Tb Expansion Chassis), they can all use the same server information per client system (edit1, using your example, which is actually what we use as well). I wasn’t sure if there would be a problem with multiple users using the same server credentials.

Thanks!

[Bob Zelin]

as long as you enter their unique names and passwords into your server (the computer that has the PEG6 in it), you can have zillions of user accounts for the same machine.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

John Davidson –
it was wonderful talking with you. You have given me the push to get FCP X working properly with our shared storage solution. Thanks for the info that you gave me yesterday. Of course, Steve M is responsible for all of this, but it was you that gave me the kick in the behind to get all of this working properly.

Thanks –
Bob Zelin

[John Davidson]

Awesome! I kicked a Cow legend! Great talking to you too Bob. Thanks for the help!

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Steve Modica]

[John Davidson] “I’d like to add additional users to a computer that accesses our NAS through the Peg 6 in a mac-mini server. I just need to set up each user the same way, with the same login into the server system, right? Or does accessing the NAS through one login apply to all users of the same computer? Would each user on the same computer need it’s own login into the NAS server? That would result in a ridiculous amount of users added….”

GACK! I’m sorry I didn’t see this.

I’ve generally advised people to have multiple user accounts on the server for each user or workstation. The issue we ran into in the past was that people would assign one user to everyone and a single workspace. People would connect with FCP 7 and assign that workspace as their scratch disks. FCP 7 creates a ton of temp files in that directory to track its state. These files are not well named. They are not uniquely named.

The result of this was FCP 7 would do weird things like save files in the wrong format and crash. This is because other sessions were overwriting previous session’s temp files.

I think if you assure that you aren’t going to run into this particular issue, you can get away with a single user, but you have to be careful.

One model I’m starting to like more and more is the sparse disk image model. It works well over a NAS, and it works with Avid and FCPX. You create a large (2TB) disk image on the shared storage, double click to mount it local, and BOOM, you have protected, volume locked space that the apps see as local. With Avid, you can do AMA volumes for the media.

Anyhow, I’m really sorry I didn’t see this sooner.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[John Davidson]

[Steve Modica] “Anyhow, I’m really sorry I didn’t see this sooner.”

No worries Steve, I usually start doing research on things like this weeks or months out form actual implementation (like with the Peg6 Mac Mini awesomeness you helped me with), so I wasn’t sitting here twittling my thumbs :). Seems like what you are talking about is exactly something I was concerned about. We don’t do huge 2Tb dmg’s for our FCPX workflow, we use smaller project specific dmg’s with media referenced to a central location on the NAS. It’s rocking along pretty well three months in.

Anyways, once the new imacs FINALLY get here in December we’ll probably try a single machine with multi-users and see how that fares. The NAS is great and makes potential workflows like this possible on multiple client machines, assuming people don’t do stupid things like save important project files to their desktop.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.