Downgrading

Deadline
1

Hi,

I’ve been trying to do a downgrade on Deadline 3.1 to 3.0 to fix some problems on our render farm. However, the manual states that I need to copy files from the install backup and this doesn’t seem to exist. I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling but the program keeps updating itself to 3.1 automatically.

Cheers,

Jon

2

Hi Jon,

You need to downgrade the Repository first. The clients automatically upgrade/downgrade themselves to the version of the Repository. There should be a backup folder in the repository root that contains versions from previous upgrades. As an alternative to copying the files manually, you could just install Deadline 3.0 over the 3.1 repository.

Cheers,

  • Ryan
3

Hi,

There was no backup folder created by 3.1 when I created it. Also, when I installed 3.0 over the top of 3.1, all the programs just automatically upgraded themselves to 3.1 again. I’ve just tried installing 3.0 to a separate location and then copying over the relevant folders manually but when I then tried to run any of the Deadline programs, the pop-up message just said ‘upgrading’ and then crashed out.

Jon

4

That’s strange. I just installed a fresh 3.0 repository and installed 3.1 over top of it, and the backup folder was created successfully. Are you using the Windows repository installer, or an installer for another OS?

Installing the 3.0 repository over the 3.1 repository should have worked. When the slaves say they’re upgrading, are they saying they’ve upgraded to 3.1 or 3.0? The slaves always say they’re “upgrading” when they’re updating themselves to match the repository version, so it could be possible that they’re just “upgrading” from 3.1 to 3.0.

The last thing to try would be to install the 3.0 repository, and then install the 3.0 clients, but the auto-updating should allow you to avoid that.

Cheers,

  • Ryan
5

Hi Ryan,

I tried installing it back over again but that failed so I just decided to do a brute mass reinstall instead. It’s the only way I could guarantee everything would work!

The reason we had to do this was because a 2D animation program called CelAction that we got supported on Deadline started crashing repeatedly upon upgrading to 3.1 (see error message below). We’re not sure why this happened but it seems to be a Deadline crash upon finishing the CelAction frames and closing the program. Has anything been changed between versions that could cause this? CelAction doesn’t have full support yet but I’m working on that soon. To create their plugin they reworked the Blender plugin.

Cheers,

Jon

6

Hi Jon,

From the error message, CelAction is returning a non-zero error code, which is usually an indication that something has gone wrong. So Deadline is just the messenger in this case. We have seen this before where an application returns that exact error code after it has written out the frame, but failed to shutdown cleanly. We can override the CheckExitCode function in the plugin to ignore certain error codes, and it sounds like that might work in this case. We can’t ignore this error though by default across all plugins though, because we have seen cases where this error code is returned before the frame is written out.

We would love to include support for CelAction out of the box. I checked CelAction’s website, but there doesn’t appear to be an evaluation version of their software. If you could put us in contact with the right person there, that would be great! If they’re willing to pass along the CelAction plugin code, we can likely include it in the next Deadline release (and also make the change to ignore this error code).

Cheers,

  • Ryan