Hi, I'm running a small render farm, working on animation. We originally had an IT guy who helped us to set it up, but we gradually began to question his knowledge and have since parted ways. Here's the problem: We are having an issue having more than ten computers on the render server. They all have the same network path to drives that are attached to the server. One drive has data for the animation and the other is for writing. One person has told us that Windows 2003 Server cannot have more than 10 computers accessing and writing to it at the same time. Is this true? If so, do you have any suggestions? I am completely open to doing research if someone could point me in the right direction. Also- in case it's important, we are using a workgroup, not a domain, because we were not able to get the render program to recognize the render nodes in domain configuration. If this is part of the problem, I can also try reconfiguring it as a domain. Opinions, please. Thanks!!! -Elisa

It is not true you are limited to 10 connections. You can have as many connections as licenses or is practical for the hardware to support. How many CALs [client access licenses] did you purchase? You can look at license manager on the server to see how many registered licenses you have. Give a person a fish, they eat for a day. Suggest they internet search and they learn a skill for a lifetime.

Yep, sounds like inadequate CAL's to me. Please help survivors of Hurricane Katrina! www.redcross.org

I tried to look up CALs, but I got a message saying "The License Logging Service is not running on \\NAME or \\NAME is not accessible." When I click "OK", it asks what domain I want to administer. I am running a workgroup, not a domain. Is this a problem? Do I need to be running a domain?

No, but you need to install additional CAL's if you never bought and installed any. If you do not want to pay for additional CAL's, you could always setup a Linux file server running SAMBA. Just make sure you have the right expertise to support it properly before implementing it. "How many squirrels had to die to make you look fly?!"