[Alex Gardiner]

[Jack Johnson] “Alex, indiestor appears to be right up my alley.”

Well sadly it doesn’t run on Mac, but Vidsharx does and its a great piece of kit! 😉

[Bob Zelin] “Here you go Jack – tell me if you feel comfortable doing this …”

Well I don’t disagree with the sentiment at all… and it is very true you have to be familiar with Linux to use indiestor.

Then again, since Jack doesn’t want bin/media sharing, or run Linux.. I didn’t bother to mention it.

Overall, best of luck with the project Jack. I’m sure you will land on your feet with this. Any more than a couple of streams to a couple of clients and I would bring the cavalry in…

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[Alex Gardiner]

Hi Jack,

Well I didn’t hear any suggestion of Drobo, so I think we can safely assume that won’t be happening…

As I said right back at the top, if you want project and media sharing, then you will need specialist software for the job.

However, since this forum basically run by vendors/sales people, I’m not going to provide a list – they can set out their own stalls. (hint – I like the SNS stuff, but thats between you and them).

All this aside, if you simply want to provide a separate share for each editor, which sounds like your goal, then you can definitely use regular shares (with care).

My point was that there can be caveats using Mac MC with AFP/SMB.

Look at a company like EditShare. For the longest time they have been primarily SMB based. However, in order to make Mac clients behave they sell Dave licenses for each seat…

In my view your questions are very relevant to this forum, unfortunately its quite a ranty place to come and ask them! haha

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[Alex Gardiner]

In my experience it depends on the MC and OS version. Some issues are worse than others.

I’ve witnessed a variety strange behaviours, from warnings when attempting to save projects (although these appear to be cosmetic), to weird playback/stability issues.

So I think its fair to say that enabling all drives seems to come with a few caveats… at least on Mac.

Disclosure: Its worth stating that I mostly work with netatalk (an open-source afp implementation). However, I’ve also seen these things crop up with bona fide Apple AFP over the years.

Overall I’m saying that you mileage may vary, so testing will be key, unless you buy software the takes care of everything for you 🙂

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[Alex Gardiner]

It depends how many streams you want to deliver at each client.

Based on the formats quoted, you’ll be OK with 10gig from the server and gigbit to each client.

Be aware Avid on Mac is a tricky customer when it comes to AFP/SMB. It also depends if you want project sharing, or not. So you might consider purchasing software from somebody like SNS… I bet they’ll be along soon enough.

If you opt to use SMB then you’ll probably need Thursby Dave on the client machines.

You can email me if you have any Avid deployment questions 🙂

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[Alex Gardiner]

hah, that sounds awesome John!

In my view ZFS is the future.

Have you started to drill down into how the cache is performing? Video is quite a different kettle of fish to serving up small files (obviously), so it can be interesting to see how ARC handles a working-set that is so unpredictable/large.

I also see you have 256GB RAM! NICE. Have you experimented with L2ARC or ZIL?

+1 disabling atime, its one of the first things I would have done too. Also, been staying away from dedup.

One of my favourite aspects of ZFS is that you can quite easily import the pool elsewhere if you suffer from HBA failure (for example). We implemented basic support in the indiestor command line for ZFS, although we’re playing with ZOL as we’re Linux based.

Also a ZFS fan 🙂

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[Alex Gardiner]

Apple have a poor track record with this stuff. Look at companies like Thursby, they make a living off an apparent lack of interest.

Best of luck fixing the problem, however something tells me it’ll be a dirty hack that you have to deploy each time the system is updated.

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[Alex Gardiner]

+1 Eric said, but here is the fix (as far as I understand the issue)

So what you’re saying is the share name has a “-1” added to it.

If so:

a) disconnect your client from the network
b) look in /Volumes (use finder > go > go to folder). I bet you’ll see a ‘stale’ folder, which basically represents the original mount point that was not cleanly ejected.
c) delete the folder and reconnect. The share should mount with the original name (not -1 or -2 etc)

I’ve seen this a few times with Mac clients attached to various indiestor servers. It really screws up Avid as well. Its just another stupid Apple problem to add to the list 😉

Alex G

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[Alex Gardiner]

Hi Guys.

Just a quick message to say that indiestor native is a community supported open-source software.

We’re about to release 0.9.5 in our public repository, which fixes a few compatibility issues with MC7, as well as adding ZFS storage support (recommended for PC edit groups only).

Over the last 18 months the project has grown pretty rapidly and we’re committed to its upkeep, because we use the solution ourselves!

In short anything you need to know, feel free to fire me a message 😉

I wouldn’t say that the solution is designed to outright compete with the likes of ISIS or EditShare.

However, you can install it on just about anything that runs Debian or Ubuntu!

Best,

Alex G

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[Alex Gardiner]

[Alex Gerulaitis] “This begs a question: if you were sold on Adaptec’s caching performance, why not ask Adaptec? (Don’t take it the wrong way – who else would we ask?)”

Luckily Adaptec support are pretty helpful.

Ultimately +1 what Alex said.

You also need to assess if the working set will actually fit on the SSD cache? I doubt Adaptec’s cache policy is anywhere near as intelligent as L2ARC (for example). Big ZFS love going on here..

Personally used Adaptec cards in a number of indiestor rigs and they perform very well. We don’t need anywhere near the same kind of performance as you though.. your IO requirements are considerable.

Also Adaptec ‘MaxView’ is not as flawless as I have liked out of the box (Linux). Hopefully it works better on Win.

Overall, you should consider budgeting to hire a specialist in your country, or at least consultation from an expert on this board (Alex Gerulaitis, Bob). It will save you money and grey hair in the long run.

I’ve no doubt you’ll get something up and running, but it might not satisfy your performance needs. DIY is always a question of suck and see, make some adjustments, see what you learn. This can be liberating.. but there is also a lot of risk involved.

Power to ya either way 🙂

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[Alex Gardiner]

What NLE are you using?

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