new

...version of our render management system, that is.

we've actually been soldiering on with something that's quite a ways from the latest release: a version down and 9 incremental updates since the major release itself.

why fix what's not broken? well, this downtime between major efforts is as good a time as any to upgrade where we can (and there's a move to make the rendering setup external to this company) -- hence a need to consider the latest version of the management software to see if it can accommodate the notion of adding a "layer" between the artist and the farm.

recently, though, i've been more editor than sysad. with the tapering off of my edit workload (several projects out the door, so to speak), the time has now come to tie up some very loose ends.

loose, because i've left the work of divining the mysteries of the render management system to our "impossible man."

he's been referred to in previous posts... ...see if you can find them. hehehe.

at any rate, for the past three weeks, he's been trying to work out how to, well, understand the software to begin with. the first hurdle was installation.

it installed, but wouldn't work. now, remember that we have a heterogenous hardware setup: wintel pcs, linux pcs, osx macs. one fine day, he came down from his office and asked me to troubleshoot the installation on osx. in the course of checking the various potential show-stoppers, i noticed that he'd copied over the linux hosts list to the osx box.

this is not a good idea. this has to do with what each operating system expects to see in that particular configuration file. linux and osx, though being unix derivatives, do have their own peculiarities and in this instance the first few lines of the host list from a linux box prevented the mac from seeing the other machines on the network...

fixed that, and sent him on his merry way.

so what am i doing? well, now i've upgraded my machine to the latest version, so i can do a parallel investigation on the workings of the upgrade, just so there'll be a backup in case "impossible man" does the impossible again...

...but, boy, reading technical documentation can be such a headache, especially when there are so many other temptations afoot (read: battlestar galactica -- the reimagined series). :-)