Hi!
I’m having a problem with popup notifications in Deadline 7 (7.0.2.3) on Linux.
They don’t seem to work anymore if the launcher is running as root on our artists’ workstations. When it was still running as the currently logged-in user everything worked fine (notifications popped up on each artist’s machine as expected).
We switched to starting the launcher as root at boot time so we can treat our workstations like render slaves. Since we are using the “Render Job As User” option, we couldn’t keep the launcher running as the current user. As far as I know this only works if the launcher/slave has sudo capabilities (which we can hardly grant to our regular artist logins).
Of course we could switch to e-mail notifications. But the popups are such a nice feature… it’s hard to let go 
The problem actually isn’t with who the user it’s running as, but instead the fact that the Launcher process is running in service mode without a UI.
The two options are mutually exclusive right now because you cannot have more than one Launcher run on a machine at the same time, and the one you’re running can’t display anything…
Now, if you folks are handy with Python, I should be able to help you build something similar where the Slaves could send a notification on an artist’s machine. Back in the day we used to support Growl, cooking an event script to tap into Growl or similar again should be a fun little project.
I see, that makes sense. Thanks for your reply!
I’m proficient with Python and I have already looked into event plugins today. I got stuck when I noticed that it’s the render slave that is executing a “Job Finished” event script. I couldn’t think of a way for our render slaves to execute notify-send on an artist’s workstation.
Hello,
Usually folks with large farms set up a single machine to act as a mail relay for the slaves, to ensure they can access email without opening too many holes.
Cheers,
Dwight