RASTER REFERENCES - TWO LOCATIONS

[elipman]

I'm working in an environment where we have two servers. One in northern ca and one in southern ca.

The design resources folders are synchronized between these two servers.

\\xxxxx-xxxx\shared_data_south\Installation\Design\Design Resource

\\yyyyyyyy\Design Resources

however, if we access the rasters from the north server when we are down south, or vice versa, it's very slow.

I was wondering if there was an environmental variable I could set or a way to reference the rasters. perhaps just setting a search path within autocad, so that the same design files when opened up north would utilize the image files from the north server, but when opened from the south office, it would use the south server.

Is there any "relative reference" or environmental variable that we could configure to make sure we're not accessing data from the far away server when we have it much more speedily accessible on our local synched server?

[cadtag]

Offhand the only trick I can think of is mapping drive letters, and pathing your raster files via the drive letter absolute path. that would only function though if your rasters were in a completely separate path, and the drawings that referenced themw ere not in the same folder.

kinda kludgy, and really not efficient. Maybe a riverbed caching appliance?

[rkmcswain]

We do this by setting up a DFS (http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Windows2003-Distributed-File-System.html) path in Windows.

For example:

Location 1 = \\serverA\share\path\file.jpg
Location 2 = \\serverB\share\path\path2\path3\file.jpg

Then we use something like \\domain.com\repfiles\imagelocation\file.jpg as the path.

Windows determines where the closest server is and uses that as the actual path to go and retreive the file at the file level. At the application level, AutoCAD simply sees the path as \\domain.com\repfiles\imagelocation\file.jpg

[cadtag]

Thanks RK, I haven't even thought about DFS since w2k first came out. Your link is a helpful article on how it works with 2k3 server.