Steps for setup:

Each user of Composer must have an active account on both SGI_A and SGI_B.
The video drivers, which are included in the Composer distribution, must reside on SGI_B in one of the following directories:

/usr/aw/TVC3.6/bin

$WF_VC_DIR/bin (same directory as on SGI_A)

The video drivers are prefixed by fbd for the frame buffer devices and vtc for the video tape controllers.

Therefore, for our example configuration, SGI_B should have the two following files:

/usr/aw/TVC3.6/bin/fbdvl (Galileo Driver)

/usr/aw/TVC3.6/bin/vtcvlan (V-LAN Driver)

The remaining files from the Composer distribution are not necessary.

Be sure that your .cshrc file on SGI_B does not produce any output or perform any window specific functions. Commands such as bindkey, tset and stty, when executed from the .cshrc file, will cause failure of remote commands. These types of commands should be placed in your .login file. As a rule, only aliases and shell/environment variable assignments should be in the .cshrc file.

Modify the device configuration file to reflect the hostname of the remote system. The default and recommended location for this file is /usr/aw/userconfig/devices and must reside on each machine licensed for Composer, in this case SGI_A.

The default devices file contains example configurations for all the supported video devices; however, only those devices which are accessible in the user's environment need be defined. Therefore, the following would be our devices file for our example configuration (notice the server_host line):

device frame buffer Galileo
        server_name fbdvl
        server_id 70025
        server_host SGI_B
        defn
                format ntsc
                videoin default
                videoout default
        enddefn
enddevice

device video controller Serial_VLAN 
        server_name vtcvlan
        server_id 80006
        server_host SGI_B
        defn
                node 1
                format ntsc
                preroll "00:00:05:00"
                ttydev ttyd2
        enddefn
enddevice

Network devices such as the Abekas and Accom disk recorders do not require remote configurations. These devices are controlled with drivers running on the local machine.

Since each video image is roughly 1 Mbyte, remote frame buffers will exhibit lower performance than a local frame buffer. In the case of the Galileo, a typical video image may take 3 seconds to display on a remote machine versus 1/4 second on a local machine. Performance is not hindered with the video tape control drivers, since they communicate with very short messages.

[email protected]