Getting the studio going

[Xiao Brian]

So, here I am. Just signed up for the forums since I may be needing some help. I guess this first introduction says who I am and what I'll be looking for. So, my name's Brian and I've been all over the IT industry for close to 15 years. I'm building up a small network of machines to get a VFX studio back online. The previous incarnation was Windows and Linux and we're moving in a different direction now.

Here is a description of our current setup.

7 Centos 6.x machines (more coming)
1 Mac Mini - with Mavericks server running open directory for the CentOS machines to authenticate to
1 Cisco switch
1 HP machine with 4x4GB drives running FreeNAS (more coming)

There is nothing Microsoft in our shop.

I want the Cent6 machines to auth to the Mac Mini. This was initially an issue because CentOS revamped LDAP with the version 6 release so we could not get a connection at all, but thanks to this guy (http://www.couyon.net/1/post/2012/0...p-support-and-authentication-in-centos-6.html) we solved that issue.

Static IP reservations made for everything on the Cisco.

So, Cent6 machines auth to Mac Mini. Adding iscsi-initiator-utils-6.2.0.873-10.el6.i686.rpm to those Cent6 machines tonight to connect to the HP with the FreeNAS storage on it, and will have auto-mount at login. So what I need is when new user accounts are created they are added to the FreeNAS machine. Not sure if CIFS is necessary for this. Thought AFP would be ok, but will gladly take a different direction if suggested.

So, as part of my introduction, I'll also say that if you have any suggestions, or anything I should be on the lookout for while setting this all up, please let me know. We have work coming soon and my artists are going to need these workstations soon.

 

[aufalien]

The best place for this kind of post is;

http://www.studiosysadmins.com/

 

[Xiao Brian]

Thanks for pointing me somewhere else. Greatly appreciated as my first response to a post in these forums. Now:

In the iSCSI Target initiator page it says the following:

"NOTE: an iSCSI target creates a block device that may be accessible to multiple initiators. A clustered filesystem is required on the block device, such as VMFS used by VMWare ESX/ESXi, in order for multiple initiators to mount the block device read/write. If a traditional filesystem such as EXT, XFS, FAT, NTFS, UFS, or ZFS is placed on the block device, care must be taken that only one initiator at a time has read/write access or the result will be filesystem corruption. If you need to support multiple clients to the same data on a non-clustered filesystem, use CIFS or NFS instead of iSCSI or create multiple iSCSI targets (one per client)."

I want my Mac Mini writing home folders and data to the freeNAS drive. Plus, artists will be read/writing to the FreeNAS machine. Can FreeNAS support this? I'll search around a bit before I get your response pointing me elsewhere.