Storing digital assets on multiple drives

[Kent Searight]

I'm using SuperContainer on a file server with multiple drives. It appears that I can only call out a file path to one drive, specifically the boot drive.

Is there any way to set the file path to other drives on the machine as well? Ideally I'd like to store images on one drive and videos on a different one.

Thanks in advance for any help!

-Kent

[Jesse Barnum]

That's a 2 part question.

Part 1: Can I store stuff on any drive? Yes, definitely. You're not restricted to the boot drive. You can change to any drive you want in the options pane on standalone mode, or by customizing the web.xml file in Tomcat mode. Remember that if you're running on Mac OS X, the OS refers to other drives from the /Volumes folder, so if I had an external drive called BigDrive, the path to it would be /Volumes/BigDrive. You can see this easily by opening up Terminal.app and dragging a folder into it - the path will be printed in the terminal.

Part 2: Can SuperContainer split storage into multiple drives? This is trickier. The simple answer is 'no'. The experimental answer would be to try symbolic links. I have not tried this myself, but if you create a symbolic link (do 'man ln' in terminal to see the syntax for this; you'll want to use the -s option to create a soft link. If you need help with this step just post back on here) from a folder in the SuperContainer to some other volume, I think that SuperContainer will use that other volume for that section of the folder structure.

Another option for this is to run multiple copies of SuperContainer. Each one would need to run on its own port, but that would definitely work - you would point each one to a separate volume for storage. I'd try the symbolic link approach first and then switch to this if that fails.

[Kent Searight]

Hi Jesse,

I finally got around to trying your suggestions here. I created a soft link, but I got the message that there wasn't an instance of SuperContainer server running at that address. Then I tried just running SuperContainer server on an external drive, but that didn't seem to be recognized either.

Any other suggestions, or has anyone accomplished yet what I'm trying to do.

Thanks in advance!

-Kent

[Wirelessmac]

Jesse,

That's a 2 part question.

Part 1: Can I store stuff on any drive? Yes, definitely. You're not restricted to the boot drive. You can change to any drive you want in the options pane on standalone mode, or by customizing the web.xml file in Tomcat mode.

OK, what about "Option 2: Installing SuperContainer with FileMaker Server Advanced"?

[Jesse Barnum]

Installing SuperContainer with FileMaker Server Advanced is really nothing more than just installing it with Tomcat (because Tomcat comes with FMSA), so read all of the mentions to 'Tomcat' as mentions to 'FileMaker Server Advanced.'.

[Wirelessmac]

That's a 2 part question.

Part 1: Can I store stuff on any drive? Yes, definitely. You're not restricted to the boot drive. You can change to any drive you want in the options pane on standalone mode, or by customizing the web.xml file in Tomcat mode. Remember that if you're running on Mac OS X, the OS refers to other drives from the /Volumes folder, so if I had an external drive called BigDrive, the path to it would be /Volumes/BigDrive. You can see this easily by opening up Terminal.app and dragging a folder into it - the path will be printed in the terminal.

Jesse,

Where is the web.xml file?

When I installed SuperContainer I launched "Installer.jar" from inside the folder "360Works_SuperContainer-2_06" which was on the desktop of the server. There is a web.xml file here "360Works_SuperContainer-2_06/SuperContainer/WEB-INF/web.xml" but when I edit it there seems to be no change to to the directory where files are stored.

I would like to store files on a second drive called "Data". Currently the files are being stored here "/Users/Shared/SuperContainer/Files"

Regards,

Simon.

Edited September 29, 2008 by Guest

[Jesse Barnum]

The web.xml file is here (starting from your FileMaker Server folder):

FileMaker Server/Web Publishing/publishing-engine/cwpe-tomcat/bin/SuperContainer/WEB-INF/web.xml