Manually trigger event in Deadline Monitor 8

Deadline
1

Hi,

In deadline 8 monitor is it possible to manually trigger an event on a slave like the FontSync event? and if so can this be done in a script?

Cheers :slight_smile:

2

It depends on the complexity of the event plugin I guess. In the case of the FontSync event plugin, this already has 2 options to execute either at “Slave Startup” on each of your Slaves or when a “Slave first picks up a job”. I’m guessing you are asking for a manual way to trigger a FontSync on a certain selection of Slaves in your Slave Panel? What if they are busy rendering at that exact moment? FontSync should generally take place when you know all the machines in question are definitely IDLE or not doing anything. Obviously, you can just look at the Slaves selected in the Slave Panel and verify their status. So, to answer your question, yes, you could take our FontSync event plugin and write a “Slave Script” wrapper around it, so when you right-click 1 or more selected Slaves in your Slave Panel -> Scripts -> Execute your [script name]. I could pull in the FontSync event plugin config as well.

However, I’m not sure this is actually the best plan. Personally, as the font sync needs to execute on the local machine, the remote command you would effectively be sending will be quite long and hassle to build up. I’m thinking a “FontSync” job plugin would be nicer in Deadline which submits using the “Maintenance Job” type, where the job only executes once per Deadline Slave in your farm (you can use whitelist/blacklist to limit to only certain Slaves instead of the entire farm). For this, I would recommend taking the “CommandLine” plugin/submitter and using that as a base for your scripting project.

3

In case of having the event already, wouldn’t the simplest way be just to manually select desired slaves from the monitor and then restart them?

4

Thanks for the suggestions MikeOwen and panze :slight_smile:

I realize now that this is not the brilliant solution I thought it would be. I’m looking into another method of syncing fonts across workstations using PowershellDSC instead of loading up deadline with non rendering tasks.