Connecting to the Storage Resource Broker

Local files are located on the hard drive(s) of your computer or on your local area network. For files from the LAN to be available to the File Management Utility, you must Map the Network Drive prior to starting the File Management Utility. See your Operating System manual for instructions on how to do this.

What's the Storage Resource Broker?

Remote files are stored on a Storage Resource Broker, or SRB. An SRB is a system designed for storing large amounts of data, such as video files.

This capacity was added to Transana because video files tend to be quite large (over 600 Megabytes for an hour of MPEG-1 video), and large collections of video files can easily overwhelm a system's hard drive. Using the File Management Utility, you can store the bulk of your video collection on an SRB, designed to hold large amounts of data, and copy just the few files you want to work with onto your local hard drive as you need them. The SRB also facilitates the secure transmission of video files between locations for collaborative projects.

Connecting to the Storage Resource Broker

To connect to the SRB, click the "Connect" button. If you do not yet have a connection to the SRB established, the SRB Connection window will open:

You should have been provided with all the necessary information to complete this form when you were given your SRB account.

Known SRB Hosts ready to store video data for Transana include storage.wcer.wisc.edu and srb.sdsc.edu. The SRB Host Port varies depending on the setup of the SRB Host you are connecting to. Storage.wcer.wisc.edu currently uses 5544.The only known Domain for use with Transana at this time is digital-insight.

There may be a variety of resources available. WCERSRBV1 and WCERSRBV2 are disk-based resources at the University of Wisconsin's Wisconsin Center for Education Research. unix-sdsc is disk-based storage at the San Diego Supercomputing Center, and hpss-sdsc is tape-based long-term storage. Be sure you have permission before storing data on any particular resource. For SEA Options, ENCRYPT1 usually works. If this does not work, you may be able to leave this field blank.

If you choose to connect to your own storage space, you will be connected to the \domain\home\username.domain Collection on the host you define. If someone else has given you permission to access files in his or her storage space, you can enter the username and domain he or she uses to connect to his or her storage space to access files.