DISCLAIMER: This is a continuing series detailing the painful story of a DIY render farm build. It is terribly technics and
somewhat frustrating. Those who are unprepared for such “entertainment” are advised to ignore these posts.
I began the new testing round with another Lux test, this time named properly and stored on an external drive, called Polyphemus. The Polyphemus drive was aliased in /tmp. This was, I hoped, a good workaround for removable storage. New drives could be aliased to /tmp and the should be automatically seen on the slaves without redoing the slave.conf every time. It occurred to me that I might build a NAS, though, and that would be the easiest.
A side note – a NAS would be simpler than the render farm, but it would also be a build on its own. Maybe I will do it yet. The general concept is that you place a small computer – usually a Mini-ATX motherboard with a fairly generic processor but a lot of external ports to connect discs – in a box and run a headless server program like NAS4Free on it. It acts as a server, but more importantly, it’s big storage available to all on the network. Finding the components would be easy (even crappy old computers can be used) but the discs cost money. Besides, my PDC pretty much is this – and old crappy computer with a are drive attached. Why not just connect more storage to the Mac Mini and I’ll have it all worked out?
So this would be Lux test number two. I had an After Effects project and a Cinema 4D job ready to go as well so I could see how they would do.
Alas, Dr. Queue did not resolve the alias. And /Volumes/Polyphemus was not available to everyone, so that was no good. I could write to /tmp for the moment, but this was obviously a weakness. Unless I auto mounted /Volumes/Polyphemus, it seemed to point to the necessity of a NAS with big storage or at least some bigger drives connected to the PDC for good. The little drive on Cyclops would not handle that much in and out.