Launcher service not launching slave on Server 2008

Deadline
1

Hello,

I’m testing out Deadline 4.0 SP1 on Server 2008, and I’m running into an issue where, when running Deadline as a service, the deadlinelauncher.exe process doesn’t launch deadlineslave.exe. When the Deadline Launcher is run as a standalone app, it launches the Deadline Slave without issue. Help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Eric

2

Hi Eric,

Is the service running under the same user name as the logged in user when you run it as a standalone app? If not, log in as the service user, run the launcher as a standalone app, and then right-click on the Launcher icon in the system tray and enable Launch Slave At Startup if it is not already enabled. Then exit the launcher and try running it as a service again.

Cheers,

  • Ryan
3

Thanks for the quick reply, Ryan. When I logged in as the account the service was running under, the Deadline Slave gave me an error that the repository wasn’t set. So it seemed like the service account didn’t have access to the settings that were set at install. After setting the repository correctly, it worked fine. So that resolved the issue.

On a side note, is this standard behavior that other user accounts aren’t receiving the preferences set by the administrator account at install? It seemed to work fine on XP, but not on Server 2008, and I’m wondering if this might cause problems if the same behavior occurs in Windows 7 and each user has to enter the repository info manually.

4

Hi Eric,

We’ll look into this. They way it is supposed to work is that the current user will use the install settings if they don’t have their own local user settings yet. It doesn’t sound like that was the case, so we’ll run some tests on Windows 7 to see if we can reproduce this.

Cheers,

  • Ryan
5

Hey Ryan,

I tested this on our Windows 7 deployment, and it looks like the current user isn’t using the install settings. Each user that logs in has to set the repository path and manually modify the launcher settings so that the slave doesn’t launch at startup. It seems like an issue with where Deadline is saving the default settings for all users. We’re going to dig into it deeper on our end, but I wanted to let you know that the expected behavior isn’t what’s happening for us.

Cheers,

Eric

6

Hi guys,

Same issue here on windows 7 (pro x64) machines.
I did a silent install of Deadline 4.0 SP1, and when my colleagues log in to a machine for the first time,
they have to manually point to the repository. This is quite an annoyance. Is this a new feature that allows
users to pick their own repository? If that is the case I’d like some way to override this (I am our domain’s admin).

Cheers!
Dennis

7

Hi Dennis,

This ended up being a bug in 4.0 SP1 that only affected the 64 bit version of Windows 7. The deadline.ini file was being created in the wrong folder, so when Deadline ran for the first time for a particular user, there were no defaults to use (the defaults being the settings specified during the installation).

This bug will be fixed in 4.1.

Cheers,

  • Ryan