Hi!
Just about to go & buy few licences for my company’s upgraded farm. Been using the 2-node free licensing system and it’s been a great experience, well done!!
Just few questions that I haven’t found an answer yet :
(Working on Windows workstation with 2 Linux Debian render nodes + the repository on a Nexenta server)
My Deadline Monitor shows that approx. once every day a slave goes offline (just having one slave atm). Status message is something like “05:25:55 Slave shutting down” and it’s Offline & grey on the Slaves list. Every time I can log into the slave and all looks fine but the slave is not running when I check with “top”-command. Simply rebooting works to bring it back to life since it runs the deadlinelaunch-command then again but it’s getting tedious. Is this due to some autoshut-down of the slave since it hasn’t been active for a while (rendering approx. 3 days of a week)? Or could it be of a automatic heat-shutdown or similar?
Sorry couldn’t find anything for this on forums.
The mapped path-option works great but how would I go about for example on Maya when I have live footage that needs to be visible on the reflections BUT which resides outside the project folder? - I really wouldn’t want to shove all footage on a project into a single Maya project every time and ruin my pipeline-folder structure.
Would somekind of a preloader script be the only solution for this or could Deadline direct these paths to correct places somehow automatically?
Just to chime in; I’ve also been hunting down this issue. I’m also using the (2) slave route, both win7/DL4 running on a gigabit lan. No matter what kind of job I throw at it (3ds/terragen, crushing requirements/simple requirements) there is one slave that shuts down every night at midnight according to the logs. The machine is not restarting, but the slave bails at midnight religiously, forcing a requeue of any task it hadn’t completed by midnight. I am not running in service mode, but do keep the launcher active in the sys tray and start the slave manually each morning.
My 2 cents toward identifying this mysterious issue (or the end-user who created it
I enjoy working with Deadline when I can. Thank you for the extensive-tinker free mode!
Does the IP address of your machine(s) change periodically? When running in Free Mode, the slaves check to see if their MAC address or IP address has changed, and if it does, the slave shuts down. This would be confirmed in the slave log on the machine. You can find the slave logs from the Slave UI by selecting Help -> Explore Log Folder.
Note that this is a security measure that only affects the Slave when it is in Free Mode. If you are using a trial or permanent license, this will never happen.
For Maya, Deadline can only handle paths that it is aware of, and in this case, that’s the Project and Output folders. If something exists outside that folder structure, there really isn’t any way for Deadline to handle it at the moment. Now, there might be a couple of options:
You could make the paths to footage appear similar on both operating systems. For example, if your footage is accessed on Windows using \server\footage, then you would mount this share to the Linux boxes as /server/footage. I think Maya is smart enough to figure out the path separators.
We could look at supporting Path Mapping on the Maya file directly if it is a .ma file. Because these files are plain text, we could do simple string replacement.
Number (1) might help you in the short term, while (2) would be something we’d have to add to the development roadmap.
The 1st problem I think got fixed when I noticed that one render node was screwed and then I had it’s motherboard changed. Works now.
How are we developing on the 2nd problem - path’s outside the project folder? Any advancing on this going to happen in the future?
The path mapping for .ma scene files is currently on the roadmap for the Deadline 6.0 release. If you want to join the beta, shoot an email to beta@thinkboxsoftware.com!
