What exactly are these permissions changes in 10.4 supposed to do? We’ve had some successful auto updates from 10.3 but manual installs are seriously broken.
We can see that the folders %program_data%/Thinkbox/Deadline10/workers/[machine name] get a permission change such that nobody can open it, or do anything with it, not even system admins. The folders have no owners and nobody has any access rights. Deadline can’t write to it so workers won’t start. Our IT company can’t figure out what’s happened to them, nor figure out how to even delete them to start over.
I’m having the same problem. As Jason said, you can take ownership of the folder (as an admin), then give yourself permissions, then delete it. I’ve been deleting the whole %ProgramData%\Thinkbox\ folder.
Thanks for the replies, we’ve been unable to find a solution to delete those folders without running chkdsk, but as admin I can rename them, so I’ve been doing that to move them aside.
After doing that, I found some machines had the same problems with some of the executable files too, and Deadline apps would not launch. I was able to use the uninstaller though, so for the rest of the machines I upgraded by:
Uninstalling 10.3
Renaming the Deadline10 folder
Installing 10.4
While doing that I did find some folders created by 10.2 which were also undeletable, so perhaps the blame isn’t entirely with 10.4
I would still love to know what’s going on here, in case this is some wider config problem we have with our admin accounts. Who are those files supposed to be owned by, and why does Windows say I need the owner’s permission to delete the files, when my admin account is the owner, and is the same account trying to delete the files?
The deadline 10.4 installation is a huge nightmare and I would not recommend upgrading.
Here are the steps you need to take to delete the deadline folder.
1 - locate C:\Program Files\Thinkbox right click on it go to properties, security and click “to change permissions, click edit” Edit button
2 - under permission click add and type everyone (enter admin password if needed)
3 - allow full control to everyone on this folder. I suppose it does not have to be everyone, it can just be your user. Click apply, a bunch of files will be processed and;
4 - now you have two scenarios, first after applying permission change if the window pops up saying some files were unable to be changed permission to we have to proceed to step 6. Second if all file permissions were changed:
5 - you can simply hit delete on the thinkbox folder and it will be deleted.
6 - if in step 5 folder was not deleted due to permission, then run powershell in admin mode, enter the following:
Remove-Item “C:\Program Files\Thinkbox” -Recurse
the thinkbox folder now will be deleted. This is only needed if there are old logs left in the log directory to which permissions have been corrupted.
Once the folder is deleted, perform a clean installation and after that, now due to new way they are handling permissions, deadline slave will run ONLY under this account, and it will not be able to be started under another account on this system. It’s really bad and I hope they fix it, but at least you will be able to get it working.
Thank you, Dmitry. Deleting / renaming the Thinkbox folder before upgrading has worked for me, although thankfully, I haven’t had to deal with multiple users on the same machine, so hopefully that’s not an issue for us.
As the pre-10.4 Thinkbox folder has no strange permissions (that I’m aware of), I’ve added a command in the 10.4 installation script, to rename that folder, before launching the 10.4 installer, and that works.
As you implied, a clean install seems to work fine (at least for a single user). It’s upgrading that causes problems.
Yes, thanks Dmitry. Your post came in just after I’d finished installing 10.4 on all our machines.
Most of our machines seems to work with multiple accounts but not all. I didn’t track which process I’d used for each machine so I don’t know what worked and what didn’t.
The ones that don’t work all complain that they can’t access slaves/.ini except when running under my account. I didn’t install it using my account though so I think maybe it’s set permissions for the first account that ran the apps.
I’m a little concerned that if I find a permissions fix, this thing will just keep breaking it each time it runs.
Next thing I may try is installing the first version we ever had and seeing if I can get the auto update to work like it did on other machines.