how to set it up

The only way I have found to circumvent this annoyance is to play a little trick on iMovie. And that trick is to move the original ~/Movies folder under a different name and put a symlink in its place (to the network folder of your choice).

Here are the steps I took from the Terminal to do this (you will need to have Administrator privileges and you will need to know where your network folder is attached):

• sudo mv ~/Movies/ ~/Movies-original
• ln -s /Volumes/my-network-volume/Movies/ ~/Movies

Now, when I load up iMovie it will use the networked volume. If you don’t like this, you can always move your ~/Movies-original folder back where it was.

remaining issues

Unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect fix. There are two caveats or issues I have found.

One, is that now my hard drive (called Papa Bear) is listed twice in the Project Library:

And two, is that when you delete an event or project from within iMovie, it moves the project into a temporary folder rather than actually deleting it. The next time you open iMovie, it will show up again. I’m sure this is because it thinks it is working with a bona fide Trash system but its not (because it is network storage. See this example:

In order to get around this annoyance, I created a Python script which removes the temporary files for me and created a cron job to run the script from time to time (cleaning up the mess iMovie leaves behind).

#!/usr/bin/env python
'''
Simple script to remove all directories that match the name:
    /iMovie Temporary Items */  [note the star!]

'''
import os
import fnmatch
import shutil

# tuple of directories to search through (you can add more than one)
DIRS = ('/Volumes/leaker-damon/tps/Videos/',)

for directory in DIRS:
    for root, dirnames, filenames in os.walk(directory):
        for directory in dirnames:
            if fnmatch.fnmatch(directory,'iMovie Temporary Items *'):
                shutil.rmtree(os.path.join(root,directory))

make this more better

Am interested to hear how other people have been handling this — this approach certainly isn’t perfect, but it seems to work (for now).

install nc and pv

If you are on a mac, you can use MacPorts to install this easily enough:

• $ sudo port install netcat pv

If you are on Ubuntu, you just need to get pv installed (nc is already there):

• $ sudo aptitude install pv

Once you have nc and pv installed, it’s really simple.  On one machine, run the following command:

• $ nc -ulp 5000 > /dev/null

On the second machine run the following command (you need the IP address of the first machine):

• $ pv < /dev/zero | nc -u ip.addy.of.other.machine 5000

And you should get some output with a little <=> sign moving across the screen that resembles this (static):

1.15GB 0:00:19 [ 218MB/s] [             <=>                  ]

This will show you the number of MB/s the connection is averaging; if you watch if for a bit, you can get an idea of where things stand. Here are some of the results I got between my PowerMac, PowerBook, and EEE PC:

localhost:                      218MB/s
gigabit Ethernet:               143MB/s
100MB ethernet:                 11.5MB/s
wireless (poor connection):     141kB/s

If you read the original post on slashdot, it seems you can us pv to measure a lot of other stuff as well — I haven’t played with it yet but should, one day.

Tested on: Ubuntu 6.06.1, 6.10, 10.04.

install libtrash and test it out

The version of libtrash in the repository is not the latest — I prefer to grab it from source which, in this case, is very easy:

• sudo aptitude install build-essential
• wget http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~marriaga/software/libtrash/libtrash-latest.tgz
• tar xzf libtrash-latest.tgz
• cd libtrash-3.2/
• make
• sudo make install

Unlike a lot of software on linux, installing it isn’t quite enough to get it running. I think this is because it is a lib package and not an actual program — it seems to be meant to be used by other programs in the background and not directly interact with the user (in the way that I want it to).

To test it out briefly, run the following to start the libtrash engine in your terminal prompt:

• export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/libtrash.so

After the above command has run, you can do a little test by creating a file (the touch command doesn’t seem to work, so create a real file) and then delete it. It should show up in your ~/Trash folder.

If it isn’t working at this point, check out the documentation at: /usr/share/doc/libtrash/

To make sure libtrash is running every time you login you need to add the export command to the top of /etc/profile:

# /etc/profile: system-wide .profile file for the Bourne shell (sh(1))
# and Bourne compatible shells (bash(1), ksh(1), ash(1), ...).

export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/libtrash.so

[...]

#!/bin/bash
export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/libtrash.so
/usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server

#Subsystem sftp /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server
Subsystem sftp /usr/local/lib/libtrash-sftp-server

case "$1" in
	start)
        export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/libtrash.so
		if [ "x$ATALK_BGROUND" = "xyes" ]; then
			echo "Starting Netatalk services in the background."
			atalk_startup >/dev/null &
		else
			echo -n "Starting Netatalk services (this will take a while): "
			atalk_startup
			echo "."
		fi
	;;

# m h  dom mon dow   command
30 01 * * * /usr/sbin/strash --age 7d