When you connect to a shared disk on a Mac, the OS mounts the disk volume in the underlying Unix file system in the /Volumes folder. By default, it will use the shared disk name as the mount point in /Volumes, but if something is in the way, it will automatically generate a different mount point (by adding a number to the name) so that the mount can still succeed.
This is a common problem if you try starting a render on a Mac before you have mounted the shared volume. The problem is caused by the fact that Smedge tries to save the captured output log with the scene file. If the file server was not mounted, the location where it would have been mounted gets filled with a folder containing the Smedge log. When you later try to mount the disk, the Mac sees that the normal location is occupied, so it changes the mount point. The Mac hides this from you in the Finder, so it's hard to notice. But Smedge uses the underlying Unix file system, where the correct paths need to be used.
The good news is that it's pretty straightforward to fix the problem and to avoid this in the future. The general rule of thumb is make sure you have mounted your file server on the Mac before you try rendering anything.
To fix the problem, follow these steps:
- Unmount your file server in the Finder, by clicking the Eject button next to its name.
- Remove any old log files that may be in the way. Go to the /Volumes folder and delete any folder that is in the way (has the same name) as the mounted volume. If you see a folder with the same name as your shared disk, and inside of it is nothing but Smedge log files, this is safe to be deleted.
- Mount your file server again.
You can verify that the file servers are mounted consistently using the Terminal app. In terminal type this command and press Return:
df
You should see something like this:
Filesystem 512-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2 487725344 150070384 337142960 31% /
devfs 211 211 0 100% /dev
fdesc 2 2 0 100% /dev
map -hosts 0 0 0 100% /net
map auto_home 0 0 0 100% /home
//guest@vault/public 1904665240 598427440 1306237800 32% /Volumes/public
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Note the last column (Mounted on) is the Unix mount point for the file server. In my example above you can see the shared disk "public" from the file server "vault" mounted on my system at /Volumes/public. You want to make sure that this Unix mount point is the same on every Mac. Rendering will then have no problems finding the scene files.
If you always mount your file servers on every machine before you start any renders, you shouldn't have any problems.
