[b]Important[/b]
Due to ongoing changes in the installers and the way we do auto-upgrades of Deadline, you must reinstall the Repository and Clients again. You DO NOT need to reinstall the MongoDB database.
If you have installed beta 6 or earlier, you MUST uninstall it first to remove the Deadline 6 bin folder from your PATH environment variable. After uninstalling, you should also manually remove the system deadline.ini file if it still exists. These are the locations of this file:
- Windows: %PROGRAMDATA%\Thinkbox\Deadline6\deadline.ini
- Linux: /var/lib/Thinkbox/Deadline6/deadline.ini
- Mac OSX: /Users/Shared/Thinkbox/Deadline6/deadline.ini
The need to uninstall the client first is necessary in this case because of changes we’ve made to allow different major versions of Deadline to run at the same time. This process should not be required again once you are running beta 7 or later.
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What’s New In Deadline 6.0.50117 (Beta 11)
This release fixes a bunch of bugs and adds a few more features that were missing.
Here are the highlighted changes.
Pool/Group Bug Fixed (sort of)
In beta 10, we unfortunately introduced a bug when we updated the MongoDB drivers that prevent Deadline from loading the pools and groups from the database. This has been fixed.
However, there is still a bug in the saving of the pools and groups. Basically, any pools or groups in the Pool/Group Management dialog will be duplicated when the settings are committed. So if you keep opening the Pool/Group Management dialog and click OK, you’ll keep doubling your pools and groups. This doesn’t appear to affect submission or rendering, and since the current beta 10 bug is affecting this, we feel it was necessary to release beta 11 with this bug in it. We are working on fixing this for beta 12.
Multiple Host Names for MongoDB
In the Repository installer, you can now specify more than one MongoDB host name to connect to using semicolons to separate the host names. For example, “host-001;host-002”. You can also edit the Hostname entry in \your\repository\settings\dbConnect.xml to specify a semicolon separated string. This is useful if you have machines on different subnets that need to access the database differently. For example, machines in the cloud might use a different host name than machines on the local network.
Note that this is not intended to support MongoDB features like sharding or replica sets. The assumption is that all entries in the MongoDB host name are just different ways of accessing the same MongoDB server.
Quick Job Filter for Job List
In the job list’s drop down menu, there is now a Quick Filter option. When toggled on, a Quick Filter panel will appear to the right of the current job list. This can be used to quickly filter on the job’s state, pool, group, user, and plugin (like you could for Deadline 5). The Quick Filter system piggy backs off of the existing filter system, and therefore is sticky between sessions.
Each job list can display its own Quick Filter panel, so you can still have multiple job lists that are filtered differently. In addition, when you switch to the graph view, you can still see the filter list.
Note that the main difference in behavior from beta 5 is that the quick filters will list all pools, groups, users, and plugins. Before, they would only show particular entries if they had a corresponding job in the job list. For the sake of performance, and in order to continue using the current filter system, we had to make this change.
General Improvements
- REGRESSION: Fixed a pool/group serialization bug that was introduced in beta 10. Pools and groups should now work properly again.
- The MongoDB connection info (host:port) is now shown in the title bar of the Monitor, Slave, and Pulse.
- The MongoDB connection info (host:port) is now shown in database connection errors.
- Multiple MongoDB host names can now be set in the Repository’s dbConnect.xml file. You can just specify a semicolon separated string for the Hostname field.
- The Extra Info 0-9 values for a job are now saved in the job statistics.
Installer Improvements
- The Temp and Trash folders in the repository are no longer created by the Repository installer because they are no longer needed.
- The Repository installer no longer tries to validate the MongoDB host name field before proceeding. This would sometimes complain that valid names were invalid.
- You can now specify a semicolon separated list of host names in the MongoDB host name field.
Monitor Improvements
- On startup, if the current user doesn’t have permissions to view a certain panel that was open when the Monitor was closed, the panel is now closed at startup instead of displaying an empty panel.
- Fixed some errors that occurred when closing the statistics or history windows.
- Fixed an error when closing the Job Details panel.
- Extra Info and Environment lists in the job properties no longer allow direct edits (they did nothing anyways). They also allow you to change the key names when editing existing items.
- Manually marking a job as complete now sets the Finished Date/Time field in the job statistics.
- The job data file and data file size are now displayed properly in the job list (the file size will only appear for jobs submitted with beta 11 and later).
- Drag & drop functionality in the Monitor should now work again. For example, you can drag a job to the desktop to copy the scene file there, or you can drag a completed task info Fusion to create a loader for the job’s output files.
- Added a Quick Filter option for the job list that allows filtering similar to Deadline 5.
- Removed the graph view button from the list panels. The menu item is still in the drop down.
- You can now right-click on reports to save them to disk. If multiple reports are selected, it will automatically zip them up. This is handy if you are sending reports to the Deadline support team.
- The image viewer dialog is now available in the job’s right-click menu.
- Moved output related stuff to its own sub menu in the job right-click menu.
- Added option to “lock” the Monitor layout. It simply prevents panels from being moved or docked. You can still “float” and close existing panels, and you can still create new panels. In locked mode, you can double-click on a floating panel’s title bar to dock it back to the main window. The “lock” option can be found in the main toolbar, or in the View menu.
Slave Improvements
- Bad job detection now works properly.
- Fixed a NullReferenceException that could occur when updating the timeout information for the current job.
Draft Improvements
- Fixed the path to ‘dpython’ in the plugin.
Maya Improvements
- Fixed a script job error that occurred when the scene file wasn’t submitted with the job.
- Added “Fatal Error:” message to list of fatal errors when strict error checking is enabled.