Hi,
We have now been testing and have successfully installed in Deadline 4.0 SP1 slaves on Windows7 64bit workstations, and Deadline 4.0SP1 Repository on Windows Server 2008 Standard, but have stumbled across a problem with After Effects rendering with Deadline running as a service.
I have a script that installs new licenced fonts into all the render farm stations, now when these fonts are installed other applications like WordPad, MS Suite, AE CS3 can see the fonts as soon as they are installed, but when rendering with Deadline and the slave running as a service, the fonts are not available to Deadline until the workstation is restarted.
Also note that even if I install the fonts manually without restarting the server but restarting the deadline service the fonts are still not seen.
The same test but with Deadline not running as a service the fonts are seen straight away when the script runs on the workstations and Deadline starts its calls to aerender and the job renders with the newly installed fonts.
I have tried stopping the Deadline service and restarting it with no succcess of seeing the fonts after a restart. Is there another process that I am not aware of that could still be locking on to the font cache that isn’t updating?
Many thanks
Jon Normington
Turner Broadcasting
Hi Jon,
That’s an interesting problem. I wonder if the problem is simply service related, but if that was the case, I would expect a restart of the service to “refresh” everything.
When you restart the service, are you ensuring that all Deadline processes have exited? The Deadline service is essentially the Deadline Launcher application. When you run the slave on the machine, the Launcher service just starts up the Slave in headless mode. So if you just restart the Launcher service, the Slave application will still be running, and since this is the application that runs aerender, that could explain why the Fonts aren’t recognized.
Cheers,
Thank you Russell for your quick reply…
When I restart or stop the launcher service I am not aware of any slaves running, when looking at the services running or processes nothing is running that I can see that is assosicated with deadline.
You say that the slave would be running in headless mode - if this is the case does this appear in the tasks?
If so what is the task name of the slave running in headless mode, so that I can kill it and test this as I don’t see anything familiar.
The interesting thing is that not running as a service the fonts are auto updated and no restart of the deadline slave is required, so this could indeed be a service problem.
Many Thanks
Jon
The slave application process would appear as deadlineslave.exe in the Task Manager (regardless of if it’s running as a service or not). Note that the slave does not appear as a separate service alongside the Deadline Launcher service, it’s just an additional process running in the background.
Cheers,
Ok Thanks Russell, I have found the deadlineslave process for which I stop but when I execute it to run again it runs with the gui and starts rendering, but when it automatically starts up in headless mode it doesn’t render the jobs not seeing the fonts.
Could you provide me with the switch to startup the slave in headless mode. I have tried /h /q -h -q but they are not working.
Many Thanks
Jon
The switch you’re looking for is -nogui. So for example:
deadlineslave.exe -nogui
Cheers,
Fantastic - Thanks Ryan
I now have the deadlineslave being killed and then the deadline slave starting back up with -nogui perfectly and recognising the fonts in the projects.
Just to let you that launcher isn’t required to be restarted only the slave has to be killed and recalled, but you can’t let deadline launcher do this automatically as it doesn’t work.
Sorry I called you Russell in my last post.
Thank you for your help.
Many Thanks
Jon