Add slave to group, pool on launch?

Deadline
1

Is there a way to specify a group and/or pool for a slave when it is launched from the command line? We’re running ‘deadlineslave -nogui’ to launch the slave daemon, in a cloud-like situation where the slave nodes have semi-dynamic hostnames. At the moment, the render nodes show up, but have to be manually added into groups / pools after the fact. Would be great to automate.

Thanks in advance for the help.

2

I dont know if this is possible on the commandline, but we do something similar, with the OnSlaveStart event in python:
https://docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/products/deadline/10.0/1_User%20Manual/manual/event-plugins.html#triggering-events

so when a slave starts up we check its os, and assign it to the correct os group, snippet:

def GetDeadlineEventListener():
    return slave_onSlaveStartListener()


def CleanupDeadlineEventListener(eventListener):
    eventListener.Cleanup()


###############################################################
# The event listener class.
###############################################################
class slave_onSlaveStartListener(DeadlineEventListener):
    '''
        When a slave starts on dealine, if it contains some of the key words in its description, deal with them
        accordingly.

    '''

    def __init__(self):
        self.OnSlaveStartedCallback += self.OnSlaveStarted

    def Cleanup(self):
        del self.OnSlaveStalledCallback

    def OnSlaveStarted(self, slave_name):

        self.LogInfo("OnSlaveStarted:: Running Event: slave has just started.")     
        slave_settings = RepositoryUtils.GetSlaveSettings(slave_name, True)

        other_os = 'win'
        cur_os = 'lin'
        if SystemUtils.IsRunningOnWindows():
            other_os = 'lin'
            cur_os = 'win'

        # remove the groups from the previous os.
        groups_to_add = []
        for group in current_groups:
            if group.endswith(other_os):
                current_groups.remove(group)
                groups_to_add.append(group.replace(other_os, cur_os))

        current_groups.extend(groups_to_add)
        # remove dups
        current_groups = list(set(current_groups))

        if not current_groups == orig_groups:
            # set the new groups
            self.LogInfo("OnSlaveStarted:: new slave groups:: %s " % current_groups)
            self.LogInfo("OnSlaveStarted:: slave_settings.SetSlaveGroups")
            slave_settings.SetSlaveGroups(current_groups)
            self.LogInfo("OnSlaveStarted:: RepositoryUtils.SaveSlaveSetting")
            RepositoryUtils.SaveSlaveSettings(slave_settings)
            # update the current slavesettings.

This chuck of code is not pretty, but i can add further help to it later.

we went through a dual boot phase were a machine would boot up with the same host name/machine name , so we needed to change its os group from win to lin .
You can add far more logic to this, if you were to setup rules for gpus’s and cpu specs to add different groups/ pools even.

By doing it at the slave startup, it configures the slave before any jobs are dequeued to it.

hope this helps.
Kym

3

That’s great! Thanks very much. Should be enough to get started.

4

Wanted to follow up to say that this worked out. There was a little finickiness in the setup, but the examples and the documentation got us there.

Now… is there a way to add a slave to the ‘Master Slave List’ of a License Limit, or all the License Limits, when a Slave launches? We’re running into a situation where new slaves don’t respect License Limits created before a Slave is launched.