Hi Guys,
We are seeing this problem.
We have 22 Deadline Floating Licenses.
But many machines say expired/invalid.
They are all correctly connected to the license server and they occasionally work but it seems as if other machines that are off-line have taken the license.
Is there a way to force the slaves to check for a license much faster??
Hey Ricardo,
Can you screenshot or attach the license error. It is located in the slave log. Is your license server and DB exist on the same machine, and what operating system are they on?
Regards,
Charles
That looks much more helpful than the “expired/invalid” the slave returns.
It seems the error is “License server down or not responding” but its weird that some do and some don’t have a license.
The hard part here is that there are three license servers listed and the last one is going to be where the error is from. 2708 is definitely a bad port as that is the one used by the vendor daemon and not the license server itself (lmgrd). There are ways to strip them down though:
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … nvvar.html
Can you try to get those machines down to just one license server + port combo and then check what error is coming out? I assume just “27008@dsback” would do it. If you need help outside that docs page, just let us know.
So our bad, my colleague had installed Hamachi VPN client on the same server and it threw the License Server onto the Hamachi IP adress.
Its all quite weird but everything is rendering now 
Can I just ask, we are looking to virtualize our servers and also the thinkbox license server.
Is there anything we should know about Virtualisation and for example, the MAC adress?
And also, is there a way to tell Deadline that it should rather give a license to a machine/machinegroup that has better specs if they are available?
As our Workstations become part of the renderfarm overnight but not all of them are the greatest.
There really isn’t a way to prefer higher caliber machines yet. There were some ideas thrown around about how we could do that, but nothing has materialized yet. We’ll be visiting the queuing system in 9.0 though, so I’m hoping to throw a few ideas at the dev team once that gets underway.
You can reserve licenses for specific machines on the license server though. Here’s the docs for that:
I think it could possibly be achievable trough slave events? I’d probably approach it from “OnSlaveStartedCallback” and check what the number of active slaves/licenses are currently online. Then I’d compare that to premade list of fast machines and if necessary figure out if I’d need to close a slower slave.
Well, one of the ideas Dwight had here was to use limits whereby the limit allotment would increase only after the higher class limit was full. I’d need to mull over the implementation for that and my morning coffee hasn’t quite kicked in yet.
The issue with “OnSlaveStarted” is that it can’t impact the queue, and since the Slaves can’t see each other, and they’ll grab whatever they see is available. We basically need a way to stop slow machines from working until the fast machines have taken their fill… Maybe you could use the enable/disable flag in the Slave info as a building block for this. Not overly elegant when the slow machines could be working on something less important.
Let’s both mull this over and report back on Monday. I’d like to bounce the idea off some folks here.
It would be nice to have a limit that you could specify filters on like:
etc…
I think our plan was something like that. The idea being that you’d have capability tags you could apply to jobs that would have a min, max, equality. I may be out of the loop on the design ideals there, but that’s what was talked about awhile ago. I’m pretty excited to see what we cook up!
That would be great.
It’s kind of how IT Reporting tools would work like PDQ Inventory for example.
You can make a “Dynamic Collection” of your network machines based on filter rules (also kind of like MS Outlook filters):
List (GPU Machines)
All machines where device name includes “NVIDIA” or “ATI” or “AMD RADEON”
