Sorry for polluting the forum so fast Maybe it’s not a wish but something I missed !
What could be useful is to add a sort of group or pool management “by plugins”.
Backburner is able to see if 3dsmax or combustion are installed on each slave, I know it will be very difficult to add this to Deadline. But it would be great to setup slaves name in Configure plugins.
For example, our renderfarm (40 slaves from sincity000 to sincity039) can only render nuke from sincity001 to sincity020 and max from 000 to 039.
To avoid errors I made some groups. But sometime annoying users are using slaves that cannot render nuke.
We are using Nuke, AFX, 3DS Max, xnormal and command line. So I cannot properly monitor slaves because users are generating too much non-critical errors. And it takes me so much time controlling each slave error reports.
This is basically what groups are for, and we’re wanting to add some autoconfiguration in a future version where slaves automatically add themselves to groups based on certain requirements. However, this still requires that the user pick the proper group to render with.
This is probably just a “user training” thing where eventually they will get used to picking the right group after they get in trouble for generating so many errors on the farm.
If it’s a real problem, you could always modify the submission scripts to hard-code the group so that there is no chance for user error.
Maybe it’s not a wish but something I missed !