Piggybacking off my other post, I wonder if there is a way to run Deadline to get the best of both worlds - running as a service and running with the logged in user.
I’m reading that the idle detection doesn’t work when Launcher runs as a service due to a Windows limitation.
I have 400 users constantly logging in / out… and at night we log everything out. So, service mode is a must… but I really need the idle detection. Any ideas?
I found some sort of powershell script that claims it can allow a service to get desktop access but no idea if it works…
It should. The trick is that the “local system account” doesn’t have good file share connectivity as far as I’m aware, but others can comment here if I’m wrong. When “interact with desktop” is on, a secret unseen desktop is spawned and the programs will run there (it doesn’t even have Explorer running). It’s been a long while, but there’s a command you can run as admin to actually log into that desktop, but that’s getting way off topic.
I think you should give it a try and see if the Slave is able to connect to the Repository share. If it’s password protected you may have some problems here as I don’t know how to set the client password for that special user. We can always give it a try though. 
Awesome! I will try some permutations and see what works!
Well, I tried the script on one computer.
It does work, but only once for some reason. You have to manually stop the slave, then idle detection will start the slave once the idle timer goes off. Then moving the mouse around on the client does kill the render… but the slave doesn’t stop. The slave then goes into “idle” mode and accepts any job again, and doesn’t respond to the computer being in use. To reset it you still have to manually stop the slave from the monitor.
I think that’s as far as I can take this idea due to incompetence on my part regarding powershell.
I’ll see if there’s some other way to get this to work. Maybe a future Deadline revision could add some small agent that the launcher could run when a user logs in or something to gain access to the desktop.
Lastly, not to hijack my own thread - but should any of the Idle Detection settings work when the launcher is started as a service?
I’m actually way ahead of you there. I have two issues in the dev system that are semi-fleshed out:
I can add you as a +1 to the second one there that may or may not require the first.
What we did is to set all the slaves to launch minimised to the task bar on the same account as the user is logged into.
These have idle detection turned on which works.
If you then need admin access to, for example, install software, you can run the install through psexec in deadline and ad login details for the admin account there.
I’m jumping in late here. But I like the idea where the slave/launcher really just talk to the service. Any updates on this feature?
Thanks! No movement yet, but I’ll add you as a +1 on the internal issue.