We are trying to move to Active Directory with my system administrator, and we’ve got a bunch of problems.
I’d like to know if anybody has some advises for me.
Here’s our setup : 80 workstation + 80 renderNodes = 160 slaves for rendering (mainly 3dsmax + vray + other plugins and some AfterEffect)
Actually, each artist had to launch the Slave when leaving work, we are all rendering on a local session.
As render Render Wrangler, i remote ~10 workstation each end of day, to “debug” it before rendering (most of time it’s just a save & exit on programs & so to free the RAM).
If anybody has his session, i won’t be able to access to it. So how can i render with an artist workstation. Does he have to switch to a ‘rendering session’ ?
I used to remote machines with window’s RDC. What’s best equivalent aside from uVNC ?
We’ve tried to install Deadline as a service, so even after reboot it can render. but it looks like that service mode is not compatible with Windows mapped drives. Do we really need to use absolute path ?
If anybody is working in AD environment can give me some impact on workflow, it would be great.
I’m far away from being against changing, but this Active Directory looks like to be a pain from my point of vue
You already made the move to AD, and are now experiencing problems?
Am I right in understanding following…
You previously had Deadline as a service running on machines and now it is not working?
You were previously able to to RDC into machines and now you cannot?
When dealing with AD you need to work with Group Policy Objects and Permissions to allow certain features to work on specific users or groups. Have you been setting this kind of stuff up?
What exactly are the problems you are getting with the Deadline as a Service? What kind of errors are you getting?
I can speak about the mapped drive issue. When running as a service, that user will not have any drives mapped unless you have logged in as that user account and explicitly marked that the drive should be remounted. I think it’s also possible to do this within AD and Charles should know better than I do.
For the moment it’s working, i’m just wondering what will be the consequence when i’ll need to render both 3dsmax 2015 & 2016 with different ini files.
My last probleme is : there’s no Rendered Frame Windows, when rendering as service. So i can’t check what’s currently rendering.
Could it be possible to see the rendered frame with the monitor, just like i can see the slave’s log ?
Due to the complexity of doing something like that, we have not added that functionality to Deadline. There is a big difference from streaming a slave log of text, and streaming the visual output of a window, which would likely be the equivalent of streaming video.
We have and AD infrastructure and run Deadline as a service with Mapped drives.
To run deadline as a service we use a dedicated user account with admin rights to run the service. Configure this during the installation stage by setting the account when it gives you the option. the username must be in the format of Domain\username or it doesn’t work. Have the account set to password never expire too in AD!
The mapped drives are done via the repository options “mapped drives” tab.
We can still use RDC when the user is not logged on but if you set the slaves to only launch when the machine is idle in the “configure slave settings” in repository options it will save you having to check and they will become render nodes when not being used.
Deadline installed as service with a generic Domaine/RenderAccount (witch i know password)
If the artist launch the slave (like he’s used to do now), he won’t have the slave’s UI launched.
Or when he log on in the morning, he doesn’t see that deadline is rendering in backside. (except that CPU is 100% buzy & RAM mostly full^^)
By the way, the fact that i can’t remote the user’s session to check the current render is what boring me the most, but that’s a windows / security issue.
I think i will force my teammates to log out when leaving work, to switch to a RenderAccount that will run Deadline in standard way.
Now i need to semi-automate the ‘log off User Session / Log on Render session’ process.
