Mac to Mac SMB share

[epm]

Has anyone run pro tools sessions off a samba share from a mac to a mac?

My sessions run and open fine, but if i have unlinked video or audio files from the path changing from the last time the session was opened, Workspace is unable to find the files regardless of the settings on the "find links" window.

We have a shared storage server (OWC Jellyfish) that runs the sessions and links video fine, and i've even tried copying some of the the flags from the /etc/nsmb.conf file from that server but still no luck relinking files on the mac to mac share.

Host machine is a Mac Mini running 12.3.1 and Client machine is Mac mini with 10.14.6, Pro Tools 2022.7

[uptheoctave]

I run multiple Mac systems but avoid doing what you are doing.

Local storage for active sessions, despite having 10G network shares between systems and the NAS.
Otherwise it is a nightmare to manage.

[epm]

Thanks for your reply. I'm aware of the limitations and concerns about running sessions over shared storage.

I have direct 10g connections (no switch/multiple NIC's on the server) from our main shared storage SMB share and the clients, and that works very well. I ran stress tests where I ran 13 systems with prores video playing back, and had 100 audio tracks playing back and recording 64 tracks each and it worked great.

I'm not trying to do a mac to mac share as a permanent solution, just trying to see if i can relink video with the mac to mac share to test a specific workflow possibility but the fact that the video won't relink mean's i can't even really test it at all. Just wanted to see if anyone had run into the same issue and had any guidance on additional samba server settings.

[Darryl Ramm]

No idea about video, but Workspace finds links uses Spotlight. That's likely not working across the SMB link, and will likely all makes sense if you think about where indices for volumes actually live. You might get it to work by sharing the top level volume.

I'm not following what you are doing exactly, but I would not be using Pro Tools sessions on a slow old NAS server with spinning HDD. Not even with disk cache. Drag the session to local SSD, work on it there and drag back. Or even better script all this to do check in and out, make automatic backup/archive copies etc.

[epm]

Appreciate the reply.

I'm just looking for the samba settings to enable spotlight indexing, which will enable workspace indexing to work via the SMB share FROM one mac to another.

I know all the merits of working from local storage.

Also... not that it really matters but I'm not running Pro Tools sessions off a "slow old NAS server" it's a 32 core XEON server with 128GB of ram and SSD cache for write/read, and 18x 10G Network interfaces for very fast direct connections to workstations. It's very fast, works great and indexing and linking works great on it.

I'm just trying to TEST a specific workflow possibility on a different samba share from a mac rather than our working shared storage, and having trouble replicating the share settings on the mac side to enable indexing so the workspace can search the share.

[Darryl Ramm]

"Also... not that it really matters but I'm not running Pro Tools sessions off a "slow old NAS server" it's a 32 core XEON server with 128GB of ram and SSD cache for write/read, and 18x 10G Network interfaces for very fast direct connections to workstations. It's very fast, works great and indexing and linking works great on it."

So we'll go with a hell of a lot slower than a local PCIe NVMe SSD

Why so many cores? ZFS and SMB is really able to use all that??? And adding so many NIC cards to a server I'd be surprised if you get very good linear scaling. Even with quality NICs with good offload processing. I'd still expect to see cores hammered with interrupts. And gets expensive if they are high-end NICs, I'd have probably spent that money on an Arista switch.

[epm]

lol...I never said working off shared network storage was faster than an internal PCI ssd.

There's some major benefits to be gained on shared storage with our particular workflow that can outweigh the pure speed of working off local storage. And we have the option to work off our local ssd's if we want too.

[Brandonx1]

i run mac to mac sessions all the time. It works fine. It's just slower then driverly off the NAS. Relinking is not problem. I always manually relink because automatically relinking takes forever.

[epm]

Originally Posted by Brandonx1

i run mac to mac sessions all the time. It works fine. It's just slower then driverly off the NAS. Relinking is not problem. I always manually relink because automatically relinking takes forever.

thanks Brandon, did you have to set any special SMB flags or permissions to get it working? Just odd that it's not working from the one test machine i'm running to another.

[Brandonx1]

Originally Posted by epm

thanks Brandon, did you have to set any special SMB flags or permissions to get it working? Just odd that it's not working from the one test machine i'm running to another.

NO I just set sharing in the pref, and logged into the other machine. Just works. I am running from a thunderbolt disk not the system disk.