AWS Thinkbox Discussion Forums

Duplicate deadline.ini in $HOME, and related errors?

Deprecated Deadline 6 Bug Reports
#1

I’ve been seeing a lot of errors related to dealdine.ini in our launcher logs. Some examples:

Error during launcher startup: Access to the path "/newhome/qmaster/Thinkbox/Deadline6/deadline.ini" is denied. (System.UnauthorizedAccessException) ... Could not set deadline.ini file setting 'User' because: Could not create file "/tmp/deadline.ini" or "/newhome/qmaster/Thinkbox/Deadline6/deadline.ini". File already exists. (System.IO.IOException) ... Could not set deadline.ini file setting 'User' because: Win32 IO returned ERROR_GEN_FAILURE. Path: /newhome/qmaster/Thinkbox/Deadline6/deadline.ini (System.IO.IOException)
We had a bunch of machines whose launcher services just quit starting all of a sudden with no log files or error messages anywhere. Turns out it was because the file in the user’s home directory was empty, or otherwise broken. This home directory is shared, so if many machines are trying to write to it, one can see how this would cause problems.

  • Why is a user-specific deadline.ini file necessary at all?
  • What are these errors about?
  • Can this please be resolved?
#2

In Deadline 7, this shouldn’t be a problem any more. In previous versions of Deadline, the applications would write their listening port number to the user’s deadline.ini file, which really was a bad idea. When conflicts happened, it could result in empty deadline.ini files, like your seeing. In Deadline 7, each application gets its own .ini file to write this information too, so the deadline.ini file shouldn’t get corrupted any more.

Cheers,
Ryan

#3

But if I have 100 render nodes all trying to write to a shared home directory, the same problem is very likely to happen, no?

#4

Or are you saying it doesn’t use the home directory at all anymore?

#5

It now uses the directory that the system’s deadline.ini file is in.

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