Luminous Landscape Forum

Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Adobe Lightroom Q&A => Topic started by: Jim Kasson on March 01, 2013, 05:39:05 pm

Title: Changing server name
Post by: Jim Kasson on March 01, 2013, 05:39:05 pm
I took down an old file server and replaced it with one with a different name. Before I took it down I copied the entire directory structure and files from the old to the new server. When I was done, LR couldn't find the files. No surprise. I looked for some way to tell LR to look in the folders with the same names on the new server, but I couldn't figure out how to do that. So I ended up telling it where every server folder was. It took a while.

Is there a better way?

Jim
Title: Re: Changing server name
Post by: Jeremy Roussak on March 02, 2013, 02:47:58 am
I took down an old file server and replaced it with one with a different name. Before I took it down I copied the entire directory structure and files from the old to the new server. When I was done, LR couldn't find the files. No surprise. I looked for some way to tell LR to look in the folders with the same names on the new server, but I couldn't figure out how to do that. So I ended up telling it where every server folder was. It took a while.

Is there a better way?

Jim

If you tell LR where the folder at the root of the hierarchy is, it should find all the subfolders. It's worked for me.

Jeremy
Title: Re: Changing server name
Post by: Jim Kasson on March 02, 2013, 03:11:46 pm
If you tell LR where the folder at the root of the hierarchy is, it should find all the subfolders.

The path to the shared directory is "\\serverName\Images B\". That path doesn't appear as a folder in the LR folder hierarchy, but rather as something above it. Here's what the collapsed top level looks like:

(http://www.kasson.com/ll/LRtoplevel.PNG)

It's these top level things that I can't figure out how to change.

While you're looking at the screen shot, note something else. There are directories that LR thinks are different because of case. LR doesn't seem to understand that Windows Domain paths are case-insensitive. Is there any way to merge the top-level entities that differ only in case?

Thanks,

Jim
Title: Re: Changing server name
Post by: Jeremy Roussak on March 04, 2013, 03:44:11 am
It looks as if LR is recognising both sets of originals. I think we need a little more information about the setup pre- and post-new server and what you did after installing the new server.

Jeremy
Title: Re: Changing server name
Post by: Jim Kasson on March 04, 2013, 10:33:27 am
I think we need a little more information about the setup pre- and post-new server and what you did after installing the new server.

Jeremy, I hope this is enough detail. The old server was named "Smythe" and had a net capacity of 6TB. It was running Windows 2008R2 and was also a dc. The new server is named "Synology1812", and it has a net capacity of 16TB, and is, as you would expect, running the Synology OS. With LR not running, I joined the new server to the domain, and copied over all the files and directories from the old server, doing a CRC check on each file to assure integrity. Then I set up the shares on the new server, with the same names and permissions as on the old. I deleted all the files from the old server, and ran a random-write program on the disks containing the old information. Then I ran dcpromo on the old server, and stripped it of all its dc roles. Then I powered it down and gave it away. I pointed the backup scripts at the new server, and I kept two sets of backups from the old server in case I had screwed something up. I verified access to the files on the new server from all workstations.

Then I started Lightroom on a workstation. As expected, it couldn't find the files that had been moved. I right-clicked on every folder that pointed to the old server, and pointed LR to the same folder on the new server. When I was done, I had two instances of the top-level server entities (I don't know what to call them), differing in case. I didn't notice when that happened, but I suspect it had something to do with my typing in the network path in the text entry field sometimes and clicking through the icons sometimes.

Notice that somehow, a similar thing happened to the D: drive, although there are no case differences that I can see there.

For completeness, although I can't figure out how it could affect things, Smythe had a fixed IP address not in the DHCP scope hard-coded into it, and Synology1812 has a fixed IP address achieved through a DHCP reservation that uses the MAC address of the new server to identify it. DHCP is through the Windows Server 2008R2 DHCP program running on one of the dc's and communicating with Active Directory to make all the names consistent.

You might well ask, "Why not rename the new server to the same name as the old server, so Lightroom could find all the folders without any intervention?" I have found that Windows Domain Controllers get confused when old names are reused, especially if the old name had once belonged to a dc.

Thanks for your help.

Jim

 
Title: Re: Changing server name
Post by: Jeremy Roussak on March 05, 2013, 03:01:39 pm
You're drifting over my capacity to help, I'm afraid. The description of what you did sounds to me as if it should have worked just fine.

I'll have to bail out here. I hope someone chips in.

Sorry.

Jeremy
Title: Re: Changing server name
Post by: Jim Kasson on March 06, 2013, 09:35:54 pm
I'll have to bail out here.

Thanks for trying, Jeremy.

Jim
Title: Re: Changing server name
Post by: Jeremy Roussak on March 08, 2013, 03:38:05 am
Thanks for trying, Jeremy.

Jim

Sorry I couldn't be more help. While you rack your brains, you might find this amusing: http://xkcd.com/910/

Jeremy
Title: Re: Changing server name
Post by: Jim Kasson on March 08, 2013, 11:51:03 am
While you rack your brains, you might find this amusing: http://xkcd.com/910/

Thanks, Jeremy. I've stopped racking my brains and I'm just going to live with it.

I've run R&D organizations and even served for a few years as a CIO of a medium sized company, and in those jobs, I've never found server naming to be an an easy thing. The two things that I think work really badly is a) pulling random names out of a hat, and b) naming servers after their function, like "DC1", "DHCP2", "Archive", or "LatestBuilds". The first scheme makes it hard for people to remember the server names, and the second keeps you from moving roles around.

What works for me is coming up with a category, and picking names randomly from within that category, the way you do when you're assigning code names to projects. I was on the board of a museum once, and we named our servers for artists. Colors, photographers, rivers, national parks...the possibilities are endless. In a large engineering organization, there are also many ways to get people upset: eg. "Why aren't there more machines with women's names?", or "Grant was a terrible president; why do we have a server named for him?"  For the last fifteen years, I've been naming Windows servers with the names that you might find the lords and ladies of a grand Victorian manor using to refer to the staff. Now, with "Downton Abbey" ever present, I've got a new set of slightly more modern names to choose from.

I started calling file servers by their hardware, and that has been a mistake. I'm considering renaming them, but then I'd have another fight with Lightroom. Ah, well...

Jim