Copenhagen Denmark my friend. [:)]
-
Hey guys -- just wanted to say that if you were interested in the whole "Mac Minis as VSL Farms" concept, I've written three articles on the subject.
They are available on my (new) website, here : http://www.createfilmscores.net/?page_id=7">http://www.createfilmscores.net/?page_id=7
Please let me know your thoughts, comments and suggestions!
Jerome
-
Thx Jerome, I have already been at ur site for the read. Great Lego StarWars movie. [[;)]]
All that remains for me now is to find a working KVM switch for the Minis, and think I have digged up every single brand and unit out there available. Problem is I dont know if they will work without flaws or if they will drop the VGA connection as reported. Any of you managed to find a purely DVI based one?
-
I can tell you about the IOGear 4-port Miniview SE that I used for a couple of years: it works really well with Mac and Windows. The only problem is that it switched horizontal and vertical ball-scrolling on the Mighty Mouse. I used it with a PC mouse that had a scroll wheel rather than a scroll ball.
-
So, here's the latest update on our setup. I consider it to be 95% finished now. Here's where we stand :
78 "instruments" / 872 articulations loaded at all time (about 18 GB of samples)
No performance issues.
The setup is based on the following slaves: 8 Mac Minis (2 GB) and 2 Powermacs (4 GB)
Jerome
-
We have a backup Mac Mini in case one of them goes down. Also, the whole library is on an external, 750 GB hard drive, so that we can reinstall it quickly if needed.
The remaining 5% are for a small bug that I've been trying to fix for some time: notes are dropping off when being played the first time. They work fine after being played once. It only seems to happen on the Mac Minis where the samples are streamed off the hard-drive.... so I need to install an external hard drive and see if the problem still happen. Until this thing is fixed, I have to consider it's only 95% operational.
Jerome
-
Jeremoe
re: the first note bug. Are you using the mini's in OSX as I still cannot get the VI to behave without drop outs under OSX. WinXP is fine. I have used external FW400 drives and the internal one and still get this problem.
Why not try a bootcamp mini (you would need to use MOL if you aren't already) and see if you get the same issues.
Best
Tim
-
@Jerome said:
We have a backup Mac Mini in case one of them goes down. Also, the whole library is on an external, 750 GB hard drive, so that we can reinstall it quickly if needed.
Hey J--
I was thinking more in the way of a power outage if you keep these machines running and loaded around the clock. But, if you're setup for quick reloads anyway, I guess that's the wisest thing one can do.
-
[edit - I lost some of this post and am fixing it before reading Jerome's response]
Have they improved? Last time I checked the UPS couldn't handle a single Mac with two hard drives.
That aside - and I'm not trying to sneer at Jerome's set-up again, because I'm willing to be convinced othewise - my argument has always been that if I'm working at the machine, I save subconciously every single time I do something I don't want to lose out of habit, so the APC shouldn't be necessary; and if I'm away from the machine, I've already saved anything I want.
But I do have my computers on two (or three) reasonably good power strips in series, and my audio equipoment is plugged into a fused isolation transformer box.
-
When a big power outage happens (and in California it happens fairly often I'd say), I don't think it's good for the gear to be shutting down like this. I think it's a pretty good idea to save your work and shut down manually all your equipment in the ± 15 minutes you have before your APCs run out.
But of course, saving is done (and should always be done) on a fairly recurrent basis.
Jerome
-
Yeah, it's better to shut everything down smoothly. But in reality we've all had to shut down machines badly lots of times, and I've never heard of a computer getting damaged that way. I suppose a split-second power outage - i.e. the power shuts off and back on before the power supplies' capacitors have had a chance to discharge - could cause hard disks to lurch. But that seems like a long shot.
And I think power outages are really pretty rare here - like once every couple of years. The big crisis was 2001, five years ago. But you can also trigger circuit breakers in your house if you have too many gadgets on, in fact I think that's a more serious concern. I had a separate circuit run into my room several years ago, mostly for that reason. (The other reason was to isolate it from bad stuff like dimmers and the refrigerator, but I'm not sure that really works.)
But I could also be wrong about power outages here:
http://www.latimes.com/business/local/power/la-me-dwp8nov08,1,5300638.story?coll=la-headlines-business-power
Anyway, sorry about going OT.
-
On the three studios I've worked in the pass 9 months, I had a total of 5 power outages [:D]
Two of them were due to rain storms in january, which, for some reason, create power outages in Pacific Palisades.
Three of them were because, for some reason, this other studio's power generator went down. The guy had to call the electricity company to figure out where the problem came from.
Anyway- the thing is, it happens. And you usually don't expect it.
As such, some people think about saving their work all the time. But sometime, you just forget. And boom! power failure.
I always say you can never be too cautious.
Realistically, making backups of your stuff is rarely useful. That doesn't prevent me from backing up like crazy.
About a year ago, my project drive stopped mounting. In more than ten years of using computers, this had never happened to me. I didn't have a backup.
Since that day, my project drive is a RAID 1, with an automatic daily backup on an external drive.
Better safe than sorry.
Jerome
-
UPSes are a bit like insurance against damage to your data due to dirty power; like all insurance, their cost needs to be weighed against the cost of the unexpected loss or corruption of data happening at the worst time.
In theory, modern operating systems are robust when power is yanked unexpectedly (DOS and non-NT-based Windows don't count as modern, by the way -- they barely count as operating systems).
However, in practice, when a computer attempts to recover from being unexpectedly shutdown, it might restore consistency to the file system by deleting anything that seems out of place. That can include all your recent work, if it was only partially saved, or if it was in the process of being updated when the power went. This can actually be hazardous to data that wasn't being directly updated, since consistency can mean: "that directory is in an unknown state, because a file in it was being renamed, so we need to remove the whole thing in order to restore its consistency".
Many file systems have what's called journalling, a technology borrowed from high-availability database systems, which works to recover data that was in transit when the power went. But you might find that its default configuration only protects the structure of the file system, and not its contents, since it can impose a performance penalty.
Note that things like RAID 1 won't help you here, because they're primarily protection against individual hard disks failing, not power to all of them at once.
How does a UPS help? Well, even if it only provides a few minutes of power to the computers which hold your work, that's enough for them to be shut down in an orderly fashion. Even fairly cheap UPSes come with a cable that can be plugged into the computers they're protecting, and this lets them be notified that power has failed. The computer can then perform shutdown actions (as well as send an alert, perhaps) once available battery power drops to a critical level.
The other useful function a UPS provides is to hide brown-outs, where the mains power doesn't fail, but dips momentarily to a level that's too low to let the equipment work right. In my experience, these are more common than complete power failures, and can leave computers in a highly weird, and generally unusable, state if they're not smoothed out by a UPS.
Of course, many computers have UPSes built into them these days anyway; they're called 'laptop batteries', and can lend a false sense of security to those who're used to the consequences of having the protection they offer, protection that isn't available by default in servers and workstations.