Advice on servers/network

Please post discussions that do not fit into any other category.
badam
V.I.P Member
V.I.P Member
Posts: 916
Joined: Tue May 11, 2021 5:36 pm
2
Full Name: Adam Berta
Company Details: InnoScan 3D Hungary Kft
Company Position Title: unknown
Country: Hungary
Linkedin Profile: No
Has thanked: 52 times
Been thanked: 297 times
Contact:

Re: Advice on servers/network

Post by badam »

it really depends on what you usually do. But cloud will always be slower then an on premise (lan) solution. And i don't think that a registation software will ever use a cloud solution that would require huge amount of bandwidth. unless they works like a remote desktop.

there are part of them could be online like recap's mesh creator.

For deliver pointcloud this is possible that the cloud solution will take over. But for registration, processing i don't think so it ever will.
User avatar
Leandre Robitaille
V.I.P Member
V.I.P Member
Posts: 542
Joined: Sat Aug 03, 2019 1:53 am
4
Full Name: Leandre Robitaille
Company Details: Cima+
Company Position Title: Civil Technician - Surveyor
Country: Canada
Has thanked: 61 times
Been thanked: 246 times

Re: Advice on servers/network

Post by Leandre Robitaille »

RJGEOMATICS wrote: Thu Aug 26, 2021 5:18 pm Even when working myself, I never mix Field and office.
I started using my ''remote desktop app'' its a google app that allows me to control a pc with my phone. It's amazing, it uses your google email for acces, works threw vpn etc. Funny thing is that I use it when on the field in between scans to work on my processing of other jobs (either controlling a pc at the office or at my place, I have 4 PC setup on that app that I can select). If I only have 1 scanner with me and do not need to use the total station I have lots of free time on my hands to do this. If I run 2 or 3 scanners(yeah I do that sometimes) at the same time, then I usually have my hand fulls and dont even touch the phone.
RJGEOMATICS
V.I.P Member
V.I.P Member
Posts: 133
Joined: Tue Apr 23, 2019 7:20 pm
4
Full Name: Bart Man
Company Details: Laser Scanning
Company Position Title: Passionate about making amazing PCs
Country: Canada
Linkedin Profile: No
Has thanked: 38 times
Been thanked: 68 times

Re: Advice on servers/network

Post by RJGEOMATICS »

Leandre Robitaille wrote: Fri Aug 27, 2021 6:30 pm
RJGEOMATICS wrote: Thu Aug 26, 2021 5:18 pm Even when working myself, I never mix Field and office.
I started using my ''remote desktop app'' its a google app that allows me to control a pc with my phone. It's amazing, it uses your google email for acces, works threw vpn etc. Funny thing is that I use it when on the field in between scans to work on my processing of other jobs (either controlling a pc at the office or at my place, I have 4 PC setup on that app that I can select). If I only have 1 scanner with me and do not need to use the total station I have lots of free time on my hands to do this. If I run 2 or 3 scanners(yeah I do that sometimes) at the same time, then I usually have my hand fulls and dont even touch the phone.
Of course if you want, can do that... I even for S&Gs made a video years ago of me running between 3 BLK360 scanners and 2 C10 scanners.
Problem is, it is not scalable. Means you need be the person at every job. Businesses need be scalable, and hiring people is complicated. And the more hats you expect an employee to wear, the harder is to hire one, and the more onboarding time that is required.
Especially when you get into Union sites, where only Union Employees can operate the scanners and you need hire off of the Union Board. Management and office processors don't need be union on these jobs, but anyone operating gear in the field does need be union.

This is why we keep roles very separate. we can't scale up and down to service client needs, if we have Jack of all Trades out in the field. So we go with the surgical precision, directed approach.

I can't split myself in 3 to service different sites... But I can send three Laborers out to grab the data.

Must also state, in due diligence having employees focus on tablets and phones, while they are at an active site scanning, is very poor safety practice and takes their attention away from the job at hand. I am sure Workers Compensation would have a hay day with a company if they learned an employee was being instructed to complete office work via a tablet, while they were at site scanning. I definitely wouldn't want open myself or my company up to that liability

The push button field functionality of BLK360 and RTC360, have made this very easy to achieve in scanning. Also even with the P40 we just have them do some simple push button scanning. C10 we have Favorite scan all programmed to be optimized for FF/FL jobs, so again, we can have anyone that knows how to level a tribrach, out in the field scanning.

Also why burn myself out. Especially if you work for a company. Actually when I managed Construction Services at WSP, employees that tried to do more in the field, hurt the system as then we couldn't freely assign crews to different jobs daily. Or call crew and say just stop by here on your drive and do this quickly, here is the job number. There is specific reasons for distinct roles and organization, especially in larger companies. Staffing is an issue, and the Jack of all trades isn't a scalable or sustainable model as a company expands, especially if it sees rapid expansion.
User avatar
gsisman
V.I.P Member
V.I.P Member
Posts: 898
Joined: Fri Oct 07, 2016 1:51 pm
7
Full Name: Steve Long
Company Details: Montgomery County DOT _ MD
Company Position Title: Land Survey Supervisor
Country: United States
Skype Name: gsisman1
Linkedin Profile: Yes
Has thanked: 767 times
Been thanked: 149 times

Re: Advice on servers/network

Post by gsisman »

badam wrote: Thu Aug 26, 2021 7:41 pm
Geo Scan Surveying wrote: Thu Aug 26, 2021 4:48 pm Hello to All,

In an ideal world, all users in any given company would have access to a centralised project database that can be worked on directly (locally or remotely), meaning there would always only be one version of any file. Downloading to work locally, to then upload back to storage means it’s much harder to keep track of current versions of files.

I’m interested to know if any of you are willing to share your favoured solutions to prevent this from happening.

This seems to be a bit of a minefield and there are many options, each with their own benefits and pitfalls.

Is cloud computing and processing in the cloud the way forward or is there an efficient way to keep it on premise that can also be accessed remotely?

Best,
Sam
........

I can only talk about register360, and recap.

Register360 works great over network (gigabit). However leica state that it is not reliable over network.We have created several projects over network which contains 1000-1500 or more setup (rtc360 small/middle res). project size is around 6-800 gb. if something is slow then it would slow on local drive as well... I have not tried to use 10g network but i suppose it is more like latency/iops issue rather then sequential read writes.

recap is just a useless piece of crap :D it is slow from local and nas drives as well. i'd not use that unless it is a must, and the sad part is that there are a lot people wants recap with bubble viewer. It is like a fortune to open a big project and then go into buble view.


As for server:

We are using truenas as a server with a bunch of spinning rust. it works great. The snapshots are awsome, you can roll back to previous versions. You have bitrot protection (scrubbing the data in predefined times/dates)

As for viewer we use a potree fork which has color, intensity panorama with images straight from reg360. and it is good for international sharing.

I don't like the lgs format as well. With potree you can do so much more (of course not out of the box). i'd not pay for publisher pro to just have lgs exports, image exports. it should be included by default if leica wants us to use that format.

i tend to hate cloud services they cost a lot more. And they usually slower then a gigabit lan.

As for native archutecture apps you are forced which format you can use. but we usually give the clients a subsampled (unified) cloud which is not as bad in a required format (rcs, e57).
Interested in any opinion here:

We currently have a Jetstream Enterprise system on a local 1GB network. We are storing our Reg 360 projects on a second NAS (RAID 10)
Our Jetstream Server Storage, which feeds into Cloudworxs for AutoCAD & Revit is a iSCI partition on the #1 NAS (RAID 5).
We found this latter configuration to work better with Jetstream as it sees the iSCI as a local connected drive. I am wondering whether adding 2 SSD 2TB drives in two of the 8 slots on the NAS to use for SSD Cache might speed things up? And would it speed up things on only the Synology managed non-iSCI portion or on both portions?
Would it speed things up on NAS#2 (RAID 10) that is hosting our Reg 360 Storage directory?
We're thinking of trialing the 10GB direct connection to two of our workstations

https://www.screencast.com/t/9i7SLysNhBNr
https://www.screencast.com/t/xGwrRPvn
badam
V.I.P Member
V.I.P Member
Posts: 916
Joined: Tue May 11, 2021 5:36 pm
2
Full Name: Adam Berta
Company Details: InnoScan 3D Hungary Kft
Company Position Title: unknown
Country: Hungary
Linkedin Profile: No
Has thanked: 52 times
Been thanked: 297 times
Contact:

Re: Advice on servers/network

Post by badam »

gsisman wrote: Tue Mar 22, 2022 6:17 pm
Interested in any opinion here:

We currently have a Jetstream Enterprise system on a local 1GB network. We are storing our Reg 360 projects on a second NAS (RAID 10)
Our Jetstream Server Storage, which feeds into Cloudworxs for AutoCAD & Revit is a iSCI partition on the #1 NAS (RAID 5).
We found this latter configuration to work better with Jetstream as it sees the iSCI as a local connected drive. I am wondering whether adding 2 SSD 2TB drives in two of the 8 slots on the NAS to use for SSD Cache might speed things up? And would it speed up things on only the Synology managed non-iSCI portion or on both portions?
Would it speed things up on NAS#2 (RAID 10) that is hosting our Reg 360 Storage directory?
We're thinking of trialing the 10GB direct connection to two of our workstations

https://www.screencast.com/t/9i7SLysNhBNr
https://www.screencast.com/t/xGwrRPvn
Well we updated recently our connection to 10g. I can copy over big files with 6-7 gbit/s without jumbo frames (funniest thing when we reading from the rtc usb drive with 5gbit/s during copy to fileserver (multithreaded robocopy)). With jumbo frames i can saturate 10g but i think it makes reg360 worse as it is not transmitting data in big blocks. So we use default MTU size. (Storage is a truenas core with raidz2 3x7 drive (and we use zstd compression it can save a lot of capacity without real performance degradation (compression ratio is about 1.22 on 80tb dataset which contains reg360 data, native files for rtc360,blk360,e57, laz files, potree files, and some other formats with insignificant amount like few hundred gigs) .))

The only times we can see the difference when there is file copy during export for example.

Well we had an nvme ssd as read cache but i just removed it. Didn't change much...

As a matter of fact i don't really see difference between local ssd projects versus projects on file server in terms of daily usage...(optimalization is little bit slower, but thats all). I usually see 500-600 mbit/s during reg360 usage.

As for iscsi, it might be faster, but it won't allow you to have a single project directory (we use that approach as i explained in other topics).

To answare your question i don't really think that adding cache drive will help nor upgrading to 10g unless you verified that you hitting that barrier. Switching to 10g can be very confusing. As we are a small company we went with the new tp link copper switches (sx108,sx105) keep in mind the 8 port version is very loud, and we use the existing cat5e cables on short distances (5-10m). We bought some used 10g base t intel nics (x540t2). It works fine.


Well maybe you can change the nas 1 to something better raid 5 will not be fast for small files. And with big drives it can be very risky. If you stick with raid and not other filesystem like zfs, btrfs, then i'd at least create raid 10 or raid 60 with loaw amount of drive 10 will be a better solution. For this kind of workload.
Post Reply

Return to “Any Other Issues”