I’m new to both the Deadline pipeline and community. I’m interested in using Deadline as my farm manager for my small farm. I have 4 or 5 remote users that need access to the farm. I’m looking for a way to setup a way to submit jobs to the manager and view basic job stats (status, time spent on job, estimated completion time, etc)
I was told this was the place to get that kind of help. I don’t mind doing the leg work as far as research goes, but I really don’t have a clue where to start. Any push in the right direction would be much appreciated.
There are a number of ways this can be handled. Generally speaking, all methods require the use of a virtual private network (VPN) to give users access to the repository, wherever it might be located. Once a user has access to the private network, they can participate in job submission, rendering, and monitoring. While not an endorsement, we often refer people to OpenVPN as a (nearly) free option for setting up a VPN. There are also several commercial alternatives like ProXPN.
The repository can be located wherever makes the most sense. If you have several users in one location and only a few users that are remote, it would make sense to locate the repository nearest to the bulk of the users. If the users equally distributed, you might locate the repository in the location with the fastest internet connection.
Another option is to locate the repository in the cloud, such as a virtual machine running on Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, or a rented server from Rackspace. In fact, we have a new extension for Deadline called VMX (virtual machine extension) that is currently in testing. VMX gives Deadline extended cloud functionality, including the ability to dynamically scale virtual render nodes in the cloud. We have a demo of VMX on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=pmM_8hsJt0E If you are interested in becoming a tester for VMX, just send me a private message on the forum and I’ll follow up with details. With regard to cloud rendering, I encourage you to do a cost / performance analysis before settling on a solution.
One thing to keep in mind with remote rendering is the input assets need to be synchronized to each location that will participate in rendering. Again, there are several ways to do that. It can be handled with scripts or with a service like DropBox or Box. There is a thread here that touches on this subject: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=10228
Anyway, feel free to send your questions, and we’ll give you some ideas to explore.
My idea was to create a webpage interface to allow uploading of files based on a user database. Users login and have access to my 2 severs: application (where the repository and deadline files are) thru said webpage and have a non-live view of the monitor (basic stats) fed by the same fields as the monitors, and a file storage server
As far as a web-based file uploading mechanism, that would likely be external to Deadline. The key, of course, is to be sure the files land on the file server in such a way that the Slaves can properly access them. You could implement this from scratch, but you might also consider a service like Box which has features along these lines.
As far as displaying user-based queue information, take a look at the Pulse Web Service. You can use it to query information from the repository/database and display it on a web page. You would have to author the web server code, of course, to provide the user login, execute the queries, and generate the output you desire.