Hey guys,
here is an interesting case. We are 3 Artists with our own small scale farms working from home. We thought about joining forces and make our machines available for the other two guys via vpn.
I have set up a vpn server and it seems like we can see each others shared drives and access them. How would we go about setting up deadline, is it even possible? How would the licensing work?
Hi Fabian,
You can configure the Slaves in each location to pull licenses from the local license server. It sounds like what you want to do is have a single repository to which all Slaves in each location report. Then each user can submit Jobs to the farm and whichever Slaves are available will pick up. So basically you would need to choose one location to act as the main repository, or you could host the repository in a neutral location like a cloud VM or rented data center server.
Then you just need to point all the Slaves at this repository. When submitting Jobs, you could use the Pools feature so that local Slaves will prefer Jobs submitted by the local user.
Probably the biggest challenge in this arrangement would be synchronizing assets to each location and configuring path mapping and so forth.
This is kind of an old post, but I’ll pitch in and say it works fine.
We do something similar in our office. Our deadline database and server are in the office, but each animator can VPN in from home or on the road to monitor jobs, submit jobs, or even add their own machine to the farm. You’ll definitely want to enable the “local rendering” option for efficiency if you are rendering over anything but a super fast connection. It’s been working great for us, and we use office machines, home machines and Amazon machines for rendering, depending on the job. We’ve got different pools and groups set up so you can easily choose to render locally, include home machines, include cloud machines, use only cloud machines, use every available machine etc.
Both the up side and the down side is that it’s so easy to take work home.
There is no surefire way to firewall your file access but there are workarounds if you don’t mind a couple admins having access. What you can do is setup drive mapping through the repository settings and then each studio’s drives can have the username/password entered into the repository. Individual artists won’t be able to see each other’s file systems but your render nodes can then VPN in (based on a pre-render script) and map a drive.