flamenco/web/project-website/content/usage/shared-storage/_index.md

title
Shared Storage

Flamenco needs some form of shared storage: a place for files to be stored that can be accessed by all the computers in the farm.

Basically there are three approaches to this:

Approach	Simple	Efficient	Render jobs are isolated
Work directly on the shared storage	✅	✅	❌
Create a copy for each render job	✅	❌	✅
Shaman Storage System	❌	✅	✅

Each is explained below.

Work Directly on the Shared Storage

Working directly in the shared storage is the simplest way to work with Flamenco.

Creating a Copy for Each Render Job

The "work on shared storage" approach has the downside that render jobs are not fully separated from each other. For example, when you change a texture while a render job is running, the subsequently rendered frames will be using that altered texture. If this is an issue for you, and you cannot use the Shaman Storage System, the approach described in this section is for you.

Shaman Storage System

TODO: write

Platform-specific Notes

Windows

The Shaman storage system uses symbolic links. On Windows the creation of symbolic links requires a change in security policy. Unfortunately, Home editions of Windows do not have a policy editor, but the freely available Polsedit can be used on these editions.

1. Press Win+R, in the popup type secpol.msc. Then click OK.
2. In the Local Security Policy window that opens, go to Security Settings > Local Policies > User Rights Assignment.
3. In the list, find the Create Symbolic Links item.
4. Double-click the item and add yourself (or the user running Flamenco Manager or the whole users group) to the list.
5. Log out & back in again, or reboot the machine.

Linux

For symlinks to work with CIFS/Samba filesystems (like a typical NAS), you need to mount it with the option mfsymlinks. As a concrete example, for a user sybren, put something like this in fstab:

//NAS/flamenco /media/flamenco cifs mfsymlinks,credentials=/home/sybren/.smbcredentials,uid=sybren,gid=users 0 0

Then put the NAS credentials in /home/sybren/.smbcredentials:

username=sybren
password=g1mm3acce55plz

and be sure to protect it with chmod 600 /home/sybren/.smbcredentials.

Finally mkdir /media/flamenco and sudo mount /media/flamenco should get things mounted.

The above info was obtained from Ask Ubuntu.