SOLVED: Possible incompatibility with Daz, ZenMate, and networked resources?

warrenao

Howdy. I seem to have discovered a possible incompatibility between Daz 4.9 and ZenMate, when I'm using a networked drive to house my Daz resources.

I have the networked drive to keep all my resources in a central location. This lets me compose on a lower-power computer, and hand off rendering to another system while I keep creating new stuff. Most of the time it works without any difficulties.

However, I've noticed that occasionally when I load Daz I get that rather galling dialog box telling me Studio couldn't connect to the CMS, and that various resources won't be available. Stopping and restarting the CMS doesn't make any difference.

Well, this seems to happen more regularly when I have ZenMate actively working as a proxy server (in its system-ectension mode, not just in a browser window like with the Chrome plugin). When I switch the ZenMate proxy off, the CMS connection seems to work more reliably.

Has anyone else noticed this as well?

prixat

I suspect it's the usual thing that all Internet security software does, it's locked down all unknown network ports.

I'm not familiar with that proxy software but there should be a way to tell Zenmate that the port used by CMS is safe.

warrenao

Okay, that's sort of where I was leaning with it myself. Unfortunately, ZM doesn't expose that level of port-opening to users. It's not especially difficult to toggle on/off, but it would be nce to have per-port control.

warrenao

I've flagged this as solved. I figured out what was going on.

When OSX mounts a remote folder foldername, it appears under /Volumes/foldername.

It appears that OSX 10.12.4 (and possibly earlier versions of 12; this has been going on a while now) will not always properly purge the volume name from /Volumes when you unmount it.

So what you end up with is something like this in your /Volumes directory:

/Volumes/Harddisk
/Volumes/foldername
/Volumes/foldername-1

…But that's not how it presents itself visually. The folders foldername and foldername-1 both appear to be called foldername, but only one of them is the remote volume you've connected to. The other has been flagged by Finder as having restricted access, as indicated by the red circular icon with the line through it on the folder.

The way to correct the problem is to unmount the remote volume, open the /Volumes directory, and force Finder to delete the locked item foldername.

Then remount, and the CMS works again.

What's happening on the back end is the CMS is getting a permission-denied error on the folder foldername each time it tries to read it. Small wonder, since OSX has itself marked it as unreadable. There's something awry on the OSX backend.