> Some of our artists can't get away from having mapped drives appear
> in their scene files, instead of UNC paths. I know UNC paths are
> more reliable, but is there some way to have Rush make sure
> drive letters are mapped on the remote Windows machines?
Windows has a command called 'net use' that can map
drive letters from the command line.
You can embed these commands in the render script
just above the render command, to ensure the drives
are mapped BEFORE the renderer is invoked.
The syntax is:
NET USE Z: \\YOURSERVER\VOLUMENAME /PERSISTENT:YES
As you can see from the syntax of the command, drive letters
are implemented on top of UNC paths in Windows. UNCs are the
"real thing".
So in the "-render" section of your submit script,
you might want to add commands like:
system("NET USE X: \\\\bigserver\\volume1 /persistent:yes");
system("NET USE Y: \\\\bigserver\\volume2 /persistent:yes");
system("NET USE Z: \\\\bigserver\\volume3 /persistent:yes");
..which ensure that the X, Y and Z drives are mapped to the
appropriate UNC paths \\bigserver\volume1, etc.
Note that in Perl, you have to double the backslashes in strings,
because backslashes are escape characters. So the UNC path \\foo\bar
has to be written as "\\\\foo\\bar" inside Perl.
However, you will want to make sure you /submit/ the job with UNC
paths, to ensure the script can at least open its log file, even
if the drives aren't already mapped on the remotes. (Before the
remote can run the script, it opens the log file, and if the log
file is a mapped drive, it can't run the script that makes the maps..)
This will protect your animator from drive letters embedded in their
scene file.
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