I’m pretty sure this is beyond the functionality of the path mapping but I figured I’d ask anyway. Is there anyway to add a variable to path mapping to have the path be different based on who submitted the job? Here’s some background:
We have over 8000 students who have access to our render farm, most never use them but they all have personal folders on our UserData share nonetheless. Most of our users are Mac users and our render farm is all PC so we have to change the paths. Previously we would automount the user share for all of our users on OSX and they would have to sift through the 8000 users to find their personal folder. So if John Smith logged in he’d see UserData on his desktop, and within that he would find a JSMITH folder. if he submitted a render the path would be /Volumes/UserData/JSMITH/render project. In Mavericks we finally got the ability to mount a specific folder within an SMB share so now when John Smith logs in we can have his personal JSMITH folder mounted right on the desktop as opposed to the UserData folder. The problem is, OSX seems to mount that folder as /Volumes/UserData rather than /Volumes/UserData/JSMTIH. So if he submitted a render as in our first example the path would now be /Volmues/UserData/render project, completely negating the JSMITH folder. Needless to say this is breaking every render we send from the Mac side. Our current drive mapping is:
Replace Path: /Volumes/UserData/
Windows Path: U:\
We were wondering if we could have the Windows path be U:$USER where $USER would be the student who submitted the job. That way we could keep the Macs automounting specific folder while still having the cross platform pathing work. I’m assuming we’ll have to go back to just mounting the UserData share rather than individual user folders, but if Deadline has functionality I’m unaware of, it would certainly make our students happy to not have to find their folder amongst 8000 others.