Hello,
In case anyone cares, I setup our fifty OS X 10.8.5 and 10.9.5 workstations to become Deadline slaves on boot and when a user logs out of their profile. I couldn’t find any documentation or forum posts that specifically instruct how to accomplish this. So, here’s how I figured it out:
Firstly, when a user logs out, a simple BASH logout script runs that executes the following 2 commands:
nohup /Applications/Thinkbox/Deadline6/DeadlineLauncher.app/Contents/MacOS/DeadlineLauncher -nogui -slave &
killall loginwindow
The nohup command is necessary here because I noticed that MayaBatch failed to launch correctly without it (took me a while to figure this out. I can elaborate more on the error if needed). Basically, nohup completely releases the process from the terminal and daemonizes it. I also needed to issue killall loginwindow because unfortunately the Deadline Slave process hangs the OS X user login window and prevents anyone from logging in while the Deadline Slave is running (there’s simply a blank grey screen with no ‘username’ or ‘password’ fields to type into). Killing the loginwindow process forces it to respawn and redraws the login window so users can login to their workstations.
Secondly, when a user logs in, a simple BASH script launches that kills any DeadlineSlave or DeadlineLauncher processes:
killall DeadlineSlave DeadlineLauncherUsing these 2 scripts as a workaround affords me the functionality I’m looking for. However, if anyone knows of a more elegant way to have the Deadline Slave run as a daemon on OS X without needing to login as a user, then please do tell.
