Working remotely

[Macker]

Hey guys,

General question here... How many of you work remotely (away from your main file storage) and how?

I've recently got a laptop so I don't spend so long at the office, and am currently in the process of trying to get network folders to sync via windows (which seemed fine until a server name change), but I'm curious as to what the rest of you are doing?

I effectively want to work at two sites with as little lag as possible; first site being work/office where the servers are, and second being at home and remotely accessing servers. Obviously the *last* thing I want to be doing is shifting huge amounts of data across the internet.

I want to be able to sit at home, click render and the laptop recognise that it should use the sync'd files, whilst vray connects to the render nodes at work and they recognise they should use the servers on their LAN.

Many thanks in advance.
Chris

[^Lele^]

I work remotely.
The best way for me is to VPN and remote connect to a workstation in the office, so the storage is local to it, and all i need to move is the framebuffer of the remote connection.
It goes without saying that lag can potentially be annoying, in which case of course i try and download a specific archive locally.

[DanielBrew]

I can work from wherever I have an internet connection.
About two and a half years ago we moved all our file servers to the cloud with our local servers acting as a cache for frequently used files. And about six months ago the Revit and visualisation teams moved from local workstations to virtual workstations accessed by laptops. Our render farm is also all VMs as well.

[glorybound]

With even just a decent internet connection I can do most things with Google Remote Desktop. I have a 15" MacBook Pro and I worked from the coffee shop yesterday perfectly fine.

[Neilg]

I VPN to the main server to get licenses and browse the network, but I mostly remote in. The exception is modeling and fiddly work I do locally.
We have a copy paste script that works from network storage - it lets me copy a bunch of max objects from the machine i'm remoting into then instantly alt tab to paste them into max running on my local machine. Just as quick sending it back when i'm done too. Remoting is just not responsive enough for that kind of work.

[MANUEL_MOUSIOL]

I can work from wherever I have an internet connection.
About two and a half years ago we moved all our file servers to the cloud with our local servers acting as a cache for frequently used files. And about six months ago the Revit and visualisation teams moved from local workstations to virtual workstations accessed by laptops. Our render farm is also all VMs as well.

What are you using for the virtual workstations?
i wanted to test out Google cloud computing but haven't had time yet. I have no clue how to set it up yet...

[DanielBrew]

Ours are all on Microsoft Azure, the actual size is Standard_NV24s_v3. We already have a virtual network on there so setting up a render farm was quite straightforward.

[glorybound]

What's the cost, if you don't mind me asking? About 5 years ago I was quoted three average workstations for $800 a month, which didn't make much sense. These were actual remote workstations that I would have rented and not virtual workstations on a remote server

[Oleg_Budeanu]

Ours are all on Microsoft Azure, the actual size is Standard_NV24s_v3. We already have a virtual network on there so setting up a render farm was quite straightforward.

Just curious, aren't Amazon cheaper? Why Microsoft Azure, is there a specific reason?

[DanielBrew]

Bobby, we pay £335/month for a 12 core, 112GB ram + 1 Nvidia M60 GPU or £670 for a 24 core, 224 GB ram + 2 M60 GPU. That cost is for 24/7 for 30 days so the actual cost would be less than a third of that (8-10 hour working day, 5 days a week.)

Oleg, I'm not sure to be honest. We are a Windows Enterprise user, all our business systems are in Azure, all our servers, network, telecoms and pcs. That wasn't my decision but it's a lot easier for me to work within that.

[Alessio]

I'm using Teamviewer for most of the things but it's definitely not good enough for working in 3dsmax. The refresh is not so good even if I'm using 1gigabit connection on both sides.
Do you use remote connection also for "production" or just for few things to do remotely?

The virtualization would be really a good thing if only the prices would be lower... I just looked on Windows Azure and a workstation like mine would cost half the street price of the hardware every month. Too much!

[^Lele^]

I'm using Teamviewer for most of the things but it's definitely not good enough for working in 3dsmax. The refresh is not so good even if I'm using 1gigabit connection on both sides.

I doubt many connections are good enough for a remote 3dsMax session, *unless* one change is made to viewports: progressive refinement *has* to be turned off.
Otherwise, it'll overload nigh any connection with the constant refreshing even when the viewport stops changing point of view or content.

[racoonart]

I also work remotely. I do modelling and painting locally (to minimize lag) and everything else can be done on my workstation at the studio which I connect to via VPN (and over which I also get all my licenses and access to the production server). I noticed that different apps seem to perform differently for people I talked to. RemoteDesktop works best for me, others prefer Teamviewer and some swear on AnyDesk (even for modelling on the remote machine).
What definitely helps is a way to clone a job onto your local machine and sync your work with the production server - I'm using TotalCommander but this is more of a semi-manual task, which is not the best option if you need to sync more often.

[Syu_z]

I'll chime in my experience here, since I also work remotely, both PC at work and home are mine. My solution is using SyncThing. (Well, the GUI version which is called SyncTrayzor).

Basically, imagine Dropbox integration, but without the need to have the Dropbox exclusive folder(This is important if you don't want to break your file directory in asset tracking). I am able to synchronize folders across two PCs at really fast speed, and the best thing about it is that it's open source and there's no size limit to what you want to sync.

I have around 300GB working files at this point, and it's able to detect latest update on PC-A, and transfer it to PC-B, with TCP(might be a wrong acronym) connection. It's blazing fast. 200MB files sync in around 1 minute or less. Since my max file never really go beyond 1GB, it's just a matter of waiting it out a little bit until it's sync-ed, and then I launch Chrome Remote Desktop to access the other PC to do rendering/whatever it needs to do.

of course the caveat is that you need to have all the working files (bitmaps, HDRI) sync-ed as well. I sync-ed my whole work folder but I am not sure how viable it is for you.

I used to try all the remote connection service but none I found really satisfying in mitigating the lag, plus I can't see the true fidelity of the image if I'm doing remote rendering. This was my solution. It's less complicated than setting up your own server and VPN, and it serves me real well so far.

Cons is, instead of only having 300GB working files in a server, it's now 300GB on each PC, totalling it at 600GB. I still find it worth the trade-off since it's not tied to any subscription pricing bandwagon.

I'm not sure if it fits your needs though. If it doesn't work, you can consider Citrix, which is basically something like teamviewer. It's one of the least laggy experience I found (though still not comparable to working locally).

[duke2]

In light of the current worldwide health situation, this has come up as an issue for us. Serving files is one thing and could be done via secure FTP, but what about licensing? Is it feasible move our license servers to an offsite cloud instance or something?