Is there a way top launch the slave GUI as a different user? I’d like to start using the run-as-root, render-as-job-user functionality, but right now everyone relies on the slave GUI to see that there’s a slave process running, whether it’s okay to kill, etc.
Ideally, I’d also love a flag that would open the GUI and connect to an existing slave process, if one exists. I could make one myself by sending queries to deadlinecommand and parsing output, but it would be much cleaner and fault-tolerant if there were a way to use the official GUI instead.
Hello,
Currently there is no way to do this in Deadline, as the slave is it’s own process, not one that connects to another slave process already running. I can suggest this to the devs, but I think this has been suggested before and I think they had then advised for users to make use of a the Monitor to watch over the slave instead of the method you suggest, which would need to be added in.
That’s fine for me, but for non-technical artists the entire monitor UI can be a bit intimidating, and it would also require them to run in super user mode to be able to kill the local slave process, and the applicable commands are all buried under several layers of cascading RMB menus. Not nearly as user-friendly as the slave UI.
I’ll probably just write a clone of the slave UI in pyqt if it comes to that, and have it periodically run deadline scripts to query status. It probably wouldn’t scale to a big facility with hundreds of artists (I imagine it would be pretty inefficient and put a heavy load on the DB), but we’re a pretty small shop for now.
A bit of history here. I talked with Ryan Russell about this back in the 6.0 dev cycle when we were talking about the live log streaming. I believe we decided at that time that it complicated things more than we’d like (what do you do if the Slave is running as an app vs service? does it always run as a service? What effect would that have on GPU-rendering software on Windows, etc).
For the complication of the Monitor, by default I have to agree with you, but have you looked at customizing the UI for them?
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … tomization
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … or-layouts
They should have access to their local Launcher which will be running as root and will be able to talk to the Slave to ask it to start and stop.
Writing your own Slave UI might be fun too, I’m just bringing up options.
Hey,
I wanted to pop in here to just add one thing to what Edwin said, to point out the local slave controls are accessible from the Launcher and Monitor, and don’t need super user access. I’ve highlighted the area of the monitor in the attached screenshot. More on Local Slave Controls is at docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … slave.html
That’s awesome, I hadn’t actually noticed that button before. 
It would be really cool if that were a dock-able panel, so I could customize a layout with that visible from the start and set which columns are visible by default.
This is all great stuff that I wasn’t previously familiar with. Thanks!
