Or, “How I stopped worrying and realized Adobe seemingly has crappy QA” (Just because you don’t support something doesn’t mean you don’t test against it)
This is another note, but it’s mainly for those of us in the Sysadmin world. I’m posting it mainly because I couldn’t find anything myself on this.
Flash CS3, e.g. Version 9, does a bit of an odd thing when you launch it for the first time. It copies it’s configuration directory to the local user account. This is so users can tweak settings and not influence the primary copy that’s in the Application folder. The problem arises with Network Homes (which, Adobe doesn’t support). This folder is about 25MB, and contains a whopping 1100 files. Coping that many files, over the network, takes a bit of time (even on gigabit). So, when a user first launches Flash CS3 on their account, the Flash CS3 window pops up, but there is no indication it’s doing anything. It just sits there, and begs to be “force quit”.
But, if you give it a few minutes (depending on your network and storage capacity), it’ll eventually continue loading. The bitch is that it doesn’t tell you what it’s doing.
What finally turned my onto this issue was this adobe page: Modifying the component files — Flash CS3 which shows you where those files are copied to.
Thankfully, after that initial copy, things work fine.
So, you may be saying “But, you could just mass copy out those files to the home directories”. And yeah, that’s true. Except we have 1600 user accounts. Which at 1100 files, that’s about 1.76 million files on the system, which I don’t really want to do. But it would probably work for some of you.
So, word to the wise… just wait for Flash CS3 to launch. It’ll take a bit, but it’ll work.
Over the winter break, I think I’m going to set up my NHR scripts (that I’ve modified from Jeff’s originals) to redirect that Flash folder. Sure, first launch of flash will be “slow” because it’s going to have to copy those files out each time someone launches Flash when they login, but at least it’ll get them off the network, and copying them locally is still a hell of a lot faster than copying them over the network.
UPDATE: I tried modifying the NHR scripts last week, and found that redirecting the Flash folder made very little difference, since copying 1100 files locally is still not a “fast” thing to do. So, at this point, I have removed the redirection of all the Adobe files in Application Support. Now, that first launch will be slow, but after that, Flash launches in about 10 seconds. Sure, that’s 1100 files for each user on the SAN, but at least Flash is usable.
<Disclaimer>I will admit, first and foremost, that this review is a bit later than I would have liked. Since the time I started wanting to review the TED 1001, the 5000 has been released that offers a few major advantages. Mainly, bang for your buck. The TED 5000 allows you to upload power data to Google Powermeter, which gives real time power graphing, much like I had to hack together on my own on my website here. With all that said, let’s get on with it.</Disclaimer>