AWS Thinkbox Discussion Forums

Deadline over VPN // Setup Questions

Deadline
#1

Hey there,

we finally got a bit of time and want to set up Thinkbox over a VPN.
Bought a new VPN router to connect the office to the remote locations.
We have a dropbox account and are using a folder inside each team members local dropbox location named “projects” to map a network drive on each location named “P:Projects”.
We have a server in the office running the deadline server and the repository locally.

Here are my questions:

  1. From what I´ve read, connecting via VPN should not be an issue and all connected workstations should be able to submit or join into renders.
  2. I´m assuming we can skip setting up all the portforwarding for the server running deadline, if we use a vpn?
  3. Not sure how deadline reads the mapping, but if all the files are locally synced via dropbox in the same folder that is mapped as the same network drive on each remote workstation (and on the locally attached rendernodes in the offce), would that just work?
    Or would we still need to set up path mapping for the remote workstations, because the exact location wouldn´t be the same?
    (because on workstation A the network mapped path would be “//WorkstationA/Dropbox/Projects” and on workstation B it would be “//WorkstationB/Dropbox/Projects” etc, even though they´d locally show up as “P:Projects”)

Would lvoe some input on this, ChatGPT keeps saying everything is fine and then contradict itself in the next sentence…:slight_smile:

#2

I’ll stick to your numbers, just with the caveat that I’ve never personally hooked up a farm running over a VPN. So folks in the community may know of some pitfalls that I’m not familiar with. With that said, onto numbers!

  1. Yep, assuming the VPN is set up correctly and we can treat it like a LAN there will be no issues.
  2. Also yes!
  3. If all machines can read/write to P:\Projects then you shouldn’t need any path mapping rules. Keep in mind path-mapping is effectively a list of rules that drive a find/replace applied to scene paths and asset paths inside the scenes.

Said another way, if the artists and render nodes all use P:\Projects you won’t have to think about path-mapping.

The mapped paths might be a little more problematic as the Mapped Drive system isn’t really built to have a rule per-workstation. It could absolutely be done with the Regions field on that feature but it would be tedious to set up, and getting Windows to do the mounting would be better/easier to automate.

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