Need some help with Podcast Producer Setup.

[macmedic13]

Hey Everyone,

First time poster, long time reader. I’ve been struggling with a Podcast Producer Setup over the past few weeks and I’m looking for some help. So what I have done is created a long description of my whole setup process to see if I’m screwing up anywhere. My big problem is revolving around xGrid and NFS. Since I’m not using an xSan, I have to use NFS and I’m having trouble getting my agents reading and writing from the share properly. Thanks for taking the time to read it if you do.

Well after working on my system for a few weeks I’m still having trouble getting everything to work, most specifically having xGrid agents run tasks. Below is a log of my work. Please criticize away if I’m doing something wrong. Just need to figure this one out.

So in my attempts in getting my PcP setup to work I have reached a road block. I just cannot get an xGrid Agent to work properly. I have decided to go through my setup step by step and see if I have gone wrong anywhere. So let’s do this step by step. First lets start out with my hardware.

[b]Server[/b]:
PowerMac G4 Dual 800 Mhz
1.5 Gig of RAM
Mac OS Server 10.5.2

[b]Client (xGrid Agent And Main Work Station):[/b]
Mac Pro (8 Cores)
8 Gig RAM
Mac OS 10.5.2

Now I know what you are saying, why did I build my server on such a piece of Junk. Well frankly, it’s all I had available. Why not build it on the Mac Pro? The Mac Pro is a Final Cut Pro production machine that needs to be functional for other things other than my PcP work. So that made me have to go with what is available. Now it shouldn’t be a problem since I’m not relying on the Server to process. All I need is to run the base services. So it should be OK. Haven’t run into system issues yet with it so should be OK.

[b]SERVER SERVICES:[/b]
So on the server I’m running the following services; DNS, OD, Mail, Web, NFS, xGrid, Podcast Producer, AFP. So it’s self contained. Let’s talk about the individual services.

[b]DNS:[/b]
So there is one zone. example.internal There are only two machine records for this, the server main.example.internal and the client, client1.example.internal. So I set this up first and confirmed forward and reverse on it. So nothing to fancy just a simple to host DNS.

[b]OD:[/b]
Open Directory is turned on. Kerberos seems to checkout and client1 bound to the directory OK. All seems to checkout on the OD front.

[b]NFS:[/b]
Created a folder on the Root of the hard Drive called /media. Enabled NFS on it with it being exported to the World, the mapping is set root to root. The minimum security is set to Kerberos and allowing sub directory mounting. I then turned on the NFS service. Punched up the thread count to 20. I then made the decision to not use automounts. But I will get back to that later

[b]MAIL:[/b]
Turned on the mail service and made sure the SMTP server was enabled. I also enabled Server Group mailing lists. I also changed the auth methods for IMAP, POP to login, PLAIN and Clear. SMTP I turned off all authentication. Also added the main.example.internal, example.internal. Other than that nothing special.

[b]WEB:[/b]
Turned on the service and turned on the webservices. All of them including Webmail, Blog, Wiki and Blog for groups as well.

[b]XGRID:[/b]
Ran the setup and configured both the agent and the controller. Made sure that the method of authentication is Kerberos.

[b]AFP:[/b]
Turned on the service and configured the Root HD to be available through AFP so I can move files easily back and forth.

[b]USERS:[/b]
Before enabling PcP I configured the needed users – podcastuser, podcastadmin and podcastxgrid. Admin was given admin privleges and email service. Email service was created for podcastuser. I also gave the podcastxgrid user a /var/empty home folder. Now I was not sure about the config on this, afp://main.example.internal as a sharepoint URL. Path to Home Folder: var/empty the Full path to /var/empty. I also created a Group called producers and added all three users to the group. I then opened Directory and modified the owner of the group to podcastadmin. I also made sure the blog and other web services were enabled for the group.

[b]GROUP:[/b]
I went to the web page for the group and enabled the podcast for it.

[b]PODCAST PRODUCER:[/b]
I configured the shared file system to the /media folder. main.example.internal as the xgrid controller. podcastxgrid as the user for the Xgrid. I configured all the properties to the proper groups and users. Enabled the service tested OK. I was able to submit a podcast and have it process on the server. Yahoo. All the processes worked OK, but only the server was processing anything.

So here is where I’m not sure about things.

CLIENT CONFIG:
Made sure I was bound to the directory. Tested OK. I also setup the NFS mount in the Directory Utility as nfs://main.example.internal/media with a mount point of /media so it would match up as to what the settings where for PcP.

Now when a job is submitted to the Server it sends out the xGrid job. The first task is an ART script which confirms that the agent has access to the shared storage. Now when I first tried this I had a failure. I went to the agent and Fired up the CLI. su’d in podcastxgrid which is the user the xgrid task should be run as. I was able to read the shared storage. Now I submitted another task to the PcP server. This time client1 was able to read the storage so it passed the ART script. Now when it attempted to process the file, encode failed. When I tried to run the process from the CLI on the agent I got an error from the qtencode task that it couldn’t save the file.

Here is the example of this:

bash-3.2$ pcastaction encode –basedir=/media/Recordings/B49D4137-67D1-4888-A6B6-5D763ED72B10/ –input=ScreenCapture-2008-04-02-132411.mov –output=ScreenCapture-2008-04-02-132411-edge.3gp –encoder=3gpp_release_5_hint_server

2008-04-02 14:07:19.372 qtencode1333:f0b there was an error saving the movie

So I then went ahead and started playing with permissions on the /media share with the same results.

So this is where I am. xGrid is logging in OK. But xGrid can’t write to the file?

So I have two questions. 1) Did I blow something in setup? and 2) Is anybody else seeing this kind of behavior?

Thanks for listening and look forward to responses.

[littlemoss_lad]

Hiya, sorry for the late reply but i’ve been having trouble getting registered on afp548’s forums. Anyway, one glaring problem I can see with your setup is that the server hosting the xgrid is a PPC and the agent you want to use with is is intel based. This will never work. The problem is that the Xgrid controller sends the binary executables to the agents to run, only they’ll be PPC binary files and not intel. Rosetta doesn’t run in this space so it won’t work. The only way I can see to fix it is to have the server software running on the MacPro system as well as the FCP stuff. It’ll handle it fine..

Hope it helps!

Dave

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