CompuServe Messages

Don, Congrats on the work and new equipment. EISA is definately nice, it's the only thing we run, and we bus-master everything! There isn't anything that comes close to it. I'm not entirely sure why your controller is holding up your tape operations. Even without a cache, at it's bare minimum configuration, it should save frames of that size without any delay at all. Especially if the EISA is fully configured, it should fly without a cache. Can you tell me a little more about your setup? Are you rendering to memory and then doing a simultaneous disk save/frame dump to tape? Give me a little bit more info and I'll see if I can't help more. The network problems are odd too. The file corruption shouldn't happen at all, especially not as sporadically as every 10th or 13th frame. We run an extremely large Netware 3.11 LAN but we Alpha/Beta'd WFW. We really dogged the program and it held up well. I would probably start by totally checking the configuration of the controller. Did you go into the EISA CFG setup and set the bus speed for the card? I know you're knowledgable about the equipment already, it just seems that with the slow data dump, and the sporadic file corruption, that the controller isn't operating correctly. Also what does your bootup looklike with regards to the DPT? As to the monitor/keyboard switch … we actually use one monitor/keyboard for every six rendering machines. We made our own boxes and they've worked well. Simple multi-contact switch setup. However, one thing that we needed to do was to make sure that the keyboard always got its power from one unit. Initially when the units switched, the power flux caused the keyboard to lockup and the machines to go south. Also depending upon the monitor, you may need to either turn it off/on during the switch or use an empty channel in the middle of the switch to make sure that there isn't any signal bleed [>> Continued in next msg]