Heyo! I’ve finally, after months and months, gotten around to looking at idle detection for our workstation farm so people don’t have to blacklist other machines from their jobs. I have it working as it is quite easy to set up. However, I have seen a very neat setup someone had where either deadline slave or the deadline launcher program would open, and if it was open the machine would be online as a slave. If someone wanted to work on the machine all they had to do was close the window or something to that effect and the machine was listed as offline. Then presumably if the machine was left idle for a certain amount of time, the program would launch itself and the machine would be back to running as a slave.
I was wondering if this was a “common” setup and if someone could point me in the direction of how I would go about/where I could find settings for this. My first challenge is that I can’t see the GUI of either slave or launcher so I am wondering if they are running in some sort of noGUI mode 
Thanks for the read!
Hi Underscore,
In the Deadline Monitor- Go to Tools->Configure Slave Scheduling
Add some machines to a group and then turn on Idle Detection.
Ours are set at 7 minutes of idle time on a workstation before the slave starts and renders jobs. We do tile rendering so each task is quite quick.
Once someone uses the pc again, the slave stops and the task is requeued.
Hey Squeaky, thanks for the reply! 
I have a similar setup to this running on the slaves right now, and it might be good enough for our use case. Most of the renders put on our network are longer, the norm seems to be about 1-2 hours pr. frame.
I was asking about the specific setup mentioned in the original post because it is a very visual way for the user to know that their machine is now no longer being used as a slave.
The use case is a computer lab where people come and go very often or where someone might move the mouse to just wake the screen and check the time so another of my concerns is if this affects the idle detection and marks the machine as not idle because someone moved the mouse to check the time.
