what kind of hardware do you have your Nexus rip on?  I was just curious as to how our hardware compares to other shops. 

We've had Nexus on PCs in the past, currently we're running it on a pre-Intel quad-core Apple G5. If I can ever convince management to fill the other four ram slots I bet it will really start to scream. As it is if we submit jobs past a certain size, virtual memory kicks in and the job slows to a crawl. In previous versions and configurations it would eventually have failed. Now it seems nearly bulletproof in that respect. If it runs at all it runs until it's done.

What kind of work do you do on it?  I just want to get an idea of what kind of workflows you are running on that thing.  We were on an Intel Mac running a PDF TotalRip.  We had soooo many problems with the TotalRip Intel Mac combo.  We had to pull it and just install the rip on a built out PC server.  Now we're running without any problems. 


With this post I am officially a Junior Member.  Hooray for me.

Dual 3.0 gHz dual core PC's with 4 gb ram. We've got two of them. We use one for rasters and the other is for screening.

We run 2 Quad core Intel Xserve macs w/ 4GB ram and 2TB of HD space. One runs our Nexus v8.4.4 (back end) and the other runs our Ody v.2.6.4 (front end). We have had pretty good luck w/ the Intel Xserves, they blaze through most of our work, we do mostly sheetfed and audio/video packaging. Granted, it could be faster, since the Nexus rip runs in Rosetta and not native.

The only problem we have w/ the 8.4.4 of Nexus is every so often a job will abort at random, but we just re-submit and then it works fine. We are running the TotalRip with hotfolders for input.

We have had a few problems with then new Intel native 8.5 of Nexus, keep getting job errors on all imposed jobs we send, so I had to pull both revisions, since we could not get any jobs from preps to run.

Whoami, what kind of problems did you have with the Intel Macs running Nexus??

Good question.  This is going to take a while!!!

Where to begin........


First of all let me begin by saying we were running Nexus 8.5 with the TotalRip and we weren't running an Xserve we were using a dual quad core intel mac pro with 10 gigs of RAM and 1.5 tb of hard drive space.  The OS was the server version of mac osx.  Since this was not working we switched to a PC.  It's an intel xeon dual quad core @ 2.33 GHz with 12 gigs of ram and 600 gb of 10k rpm HD space.  We beefed up the network as well so we could copy over files at blazing speeds.


Well to begin describing what was 2 months of non stop headaches... we had to copy over some tiff files to a Windows server and that would error out because the name of some tiff files were too long.  I know we could have shortened the names but then the color would not be recognized by our Fuji PDPro server.  We got around that by installing ExtremeZ-IP on our Fuji windows servers.  It's good software but very expensive for just allowing us to copy files.  It does a lot more but we didn't need it for anything else.    That was one problem

Then a huge problem that stopped us from using it completely is that the Epson module was not working at all.  We noticed this in 8.5 rev 1 and we were told it was going to work in rev 2 but it still didn't work.  So we had to pull the Mac server and put it on a PC server where it did send Epsons.  That's another problem we ran into. 

The soap server was another problem.  Everytime we would submit a PDF through shuttle it would be very very slow and some people would get too impatient and just force quit shuttle thinking it wasn't working.  This cause the soap server to freeze up.  Normally I would just quit that module and then it restarts automatically and the soap server would run again.  On the mac I would have to quit the whole rip just to get the soap server running again.  On our PC we have little to no problems with this. 

Also like I said earlier we couldn't use Librarian but that was both on a PC and the Mac.  I haven't tried it on rev 3 yet. 

The PDF trapper is still not up to par.

Neo is also not up to par when it comes to trapping or ease of use.  Maybe i'm saying this because I have been using Artpro to trap my files for years now and it is one of the best pieces of software I have ever used.  Neo is nothing like Artpro.  To trap a simple drop shadow it takes soo much effort and work arounds that it's simply not worth it.  Also it hardly has any keyboard shortcuts.  In Artpro almost everything was done via keyboard shortcuts.

A great advantage of being on the Mac is that you could drag and drop into the workflows from any of our servers without having to copy it locally to the Nexus server.  This would have helped us out a lot. 

I'm staying positive though.  It is running really good on our PC now. Although rev3 might have fixed a lot of the problem we were having on the mac I haven't tried it out yet. 

I feel for ya, we had to switch to ExtremeZ due to file names, but so far everyone here loves the ability to use long file names on any of the equipment we run/ mix of PCs & Macs. Luckly we did not have the Epson problem, since we do not run direct to our Epson printer, it get's handed off to out Agfa Sherpa setup, which processes the files from there.

We trap our files through Ody then hand those files off to Preps for impo, then run the impo file through Nexus TotalRip, the only problems we get are random aborts, but no big deal really, we just rerun the aborted file.

The Nexus 8.5 is a whole different story for us, we cannot get any Preps impos to not error out with a missing font error, I haven't tried the new revision 3 yet, but hopefully will get a chance soon.