I've been testing out Postlab for our remote workflow, and one of the requirements is that you cannot use Postlab's Avid bin locking feature at the same time that the Avid NEXIS Client is running, and has already mounted a workspace.

For "security" reasons, we currently only want to use Postlab for live sharing of the Avid project with our work-from-home editors, and not for serving up the actual media. Remote editors download Avid Media to their locally attached storage, via Frame.io. This works great with Postlab.

However, in one of our locations, we have 4 editors under the same roof, accessing Avid Media on individual workspaces located on a NEXIS Pro. When I asked Postlab support about how to get this to work in a "hybrid" Postlab workflow, they said that because you cannot have the NEXIS Client running at the same time as Postlab, that the workaround would be "Mounting your Avid or compatible third-party shared storage folders as network shares in Finder."

I looked in the NEXIS documentation for any sort of option to mount workspaces as standard SMB or AFP network filesystems, but was not surprised to find anything related to that.

Is what Postlab support suggesting even possible with a NEXIS Pro?

They are suggesting using the File Gateway. This is not supported for real-time playback of media, its a push/pull workflow. Media Composer will not see the shares as a Workspace so project sharing won't function. This is a terrible idea and won’t work.

File Gateway is basically a reshare. You use another computer to mount the Nexis workspace and reshare it to other computers using standard SMB/CIFS protocols. Highly recommend using 10Gb connection for the FG server to the Nexis and 10Gb to the client network.

I assume Postlab will do the translation for Avid bin locking support.

The File Gateway is a Linux VM and not free, as a science project one could build a beefy VM infrastructure and give it a try. Using Postlab for Bin Locking will require the option for Media Composer to support third party storage. This will disable Bin Refresh in Media Composer. It would be easier to replace the NEXIS with some type of dumb storage.

If it's shipping, NEXIS | EDGE might be a good solution.

Just a thought. But perhaps what is meant is that you can't mount workspaces with Nexis Client but you can have the Nexis Client installed. When Nexis Client is installed on a workstation, but not connected to Nexis, the normal smb connect methods are available. I do this all the time to quickly access files on a workspace without mounting the workspace.

ck123:

Just a thought. But perhaps what is meant is that you can't mount workspaces with Nexis Client but you can have the Nexis Client installed. When Nexis Client is installed on a workstation, but not connected to Nexis, the normal smb connect methods are available. I do this all the time to quickly access files on a workspace without mounting the workspace.

I believe what you're referring to is what I'd consider a design flaw in the Windows NEXIS driver. In Windows when the user is logged in via the client manager or command line all the workspaces that user is entitled to are available under Network. Unmounting the workspace even signing out and quitting the NEXIS client will leave the workspaces available under Network. It requires a different user to sign-in to the client manager or driver to be restarted.

The Mac and Linux clients don't behave in this fashion. 

The issue at hand is the NEXIS driver and Postlabs reverse engineered spoofed driver can't be loaded at the same time.