Dev Blog #023

Yes, I'm early this time by four days, but I had to get these back into a weekend release rather than mid-week.

Centralisation is a Bitch!
I have had one of the most frustrating 10-day periods (not the bleeding, wrong gender) in recent times. I wrote how I'd purchased the ASUS ROG FLOW X16 last time; I thought, 'why have two versions of my Daz Library when I could centralise them and only have one?'. Not a flawed thought process, right? Sounds like the smart thing to do, right? The answer to both of those is obviously yes! But implementing is a right fucking chew on!!

I will start at the beginning so you can live through all this trauma too, but please don't send me your therapy bills. I started this journey to despair with the SABRENT USB 3.0 4 BAY 2.5" HDD/SSD DOCKING STATION, which is brilliant; the fans are a little loud, but you can turn it off when not in use…

## Note; if I find any useful tech, I'll provide a link to them on Amazon or something; I'm not affiliated, so I don't get anything for sharing. ##

…After ordering, it arrived the next day; go PRIME! Plugged it and stuck 4 different-sized SSDs in, and boom, four new disk drives were ready for data. I copied my libraries over; it wasn't a painful experience, but it took a long ass time. Eight hours of sleep later, my data was all copied over, and I was ready to start exploring options for centralisation.

My first choice was a Router with a USB 3.0 port. I helped Cr8tive M3dia set up his ASUS RT-AC86U Wi-Fi AC2900 Mesh Router earlier in the week. This was done via Discord, so it took a while; you forget how good Teams is in such situations. Anyway, I'm getting off-track; It took some jiggery-pokery to get this FTP share to work, but we got there. A few days later, I bought the same router and figured, hey, I know who it's done, and I know it works; wise investment. Another few days later, the router arrived, I set the whole thing up in less than 10 minutes, and everything worked to a point. Luckily the ASUS router has a mobile app that can monitor the router status. It was crashing like a test dummy in a car. The internet never dropped out, but the router couldn't handle large file data transfers; both CPUs & the RAM were at 100%. So back to the drawing board, I had an FTP share that worked but couldn't handle the data load, so I needed a more robust solution.

A home server! Did some research; yes, it was the perfect solution, only problem mega bucks or DIY. The Megabucks were out of the question, so DIY it was. I had my old laptop; I could make that into a file server. Then it dawned on me I would have to have this on all the time, and energy is at a premium right now, so I thought that maybe this wasn't the best way to go. Back in Discord, I was pissing and moaning to Shaddy, and he mentioned that he thought Westy used a NAS drive for this exact purpose. And, when you speak of the Devil, he shall appear; Westy popped into the chat a few minutes later, so I got to quiz him on his setup. Turns out he uses OneDrive, and although it works a treat, he is also considering a networked solution.

A few more days went by, and I'm considering my options and downloading missing Daz assets because if I get this all to work seamlessly, I want to jump right into things. I can't remember who mentioned it, but it was either Shaddy, 13 or Cr8tive. They said using NAS; by sheer fortune, I had a SYNOLOGY DS18 NAS with two 8TB IRONWOLF HDDs. The only problem was I had it turned off the last two years due to regular power cuts, turned out BOTH drives were fucked! What happened next was a long weekend of trying to fix the NAS Drives and figuring out ways to get this all to work. I got to the point where I was about to throw this NAS unit on the floor and smash it to smithereens. At that moment, I had an epiphany; the NAS drives don't work, but if I plug the SABRENT DOCK into one of the two USB 3.0 ports on the back, maybe I can get that to share on the network. Ding ding ding! Winner winner chicken dinner! The four drives became available on my NETWORK as shares; I quickly mapped network drives to them on both devices, and it worked like a dream until the next day.

I came home from work excited to start posing a new scene, and no Smart Content in Daz, nada, zilch; what the fuck! Tried everything, went to the forums, and did everything they said; nothing. So the only action is to reinstall my entire library on the network share, no biggy. 275GB, that's all I needed to reinstall; however, things to the network share do move a little slower, and that's to be expected; I'm routing from a PC to NAS to the externally attached storage. So I cancelled the reinstall after an hour and thought, let us see if this worked; it did; I had the few items installed in my innovative Content. So being my excellent nerd, I wanted to know why; eureka! This tiny file called "InstallManagerFileRegister.json" lists ALL the assets installed by DIM (Daz Install Manager) and where to find them. I found two versions, one in the root of the network share and the other in the "Daz Library" sub-folder of the network share. In my error, when I made the sub-folder, I moved everything BUT this file, thinking it was trash. This is an important file, along with those silly 'Manifest Files'. Rolling the older version into the sub-folder and overwriting the newer version solved most of the issues.

Last night; yay, we are in recent history. I started to set things up as my Daughters wanted to create a character for my game; each. They had so much fun making Sarah Love with me that they want to try it independently, so why not. My Smart Content was missing many assets, like the Genesis 8 Figures; around 80% of my library was missing. I instantly knew what had gone wrong; it was to do with the duplicate deleting I talked about a few weeks back. I'd deleted the file I needed, as I wasn't aware of this file's importance. The easiest solution is to reinstall all my Daz assets again. So this is where I am at; currently writing this blog about ONE single issue while 1600+ items are reinstalling. It's 13:24 for me. I started this at 22:36 the night before; why is it taking so long? Besides the slowness of the data transfer between three devices, two of which are data controllers (OS's that manage data transfers the issue is my disk drives were in sleep mode until it detected mouse or keyboard input; needless to say, this is now disabled my drive will sleep no more; until I turn the power off of course.

Anyway, I've had enough rambling about this whole thing, though it feels good to get it off my chest; that might save me some money in therapy. I'll see you guys in the next update, and feel free to message me in Discord.

Snowy


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