Windows permission errors with multiple users

Deadline
1

Additionally to using deadline for our renderfarm, we use it on workstations to increase render capacity.

This works as long as the same user is rendering on a workstation. However in the case where a employee leaves the company and the workstation is assigned to a new employee, the windows user will change.

This introduces the following error when trying to start the deadline worker:
error

The new user has no permission to write the .ini file created by the old user.

The same also applies to following temporary directories, which might still be around:
C:\ProgramData\Thinkbox\Deadline10\workers\<workername>\jobsData\68ee0f64407e707d577da839
C:\ProgramData\Thinkbox\Deadline10\workers\<workername>\plugins\68ee0f64407e707d577da839

Currently the workaround we are doing is using the following commands to make the new user owner of the files:

icacls <directory> /grant %USERNAME%:F /T
takeown /F <directory> /R

There are 2 solutions to this problem:

  1. Change permissions so all local windows users are allowed to read and write files in C:\ProgramData\Thinkbox\Deadline10
  2. Do not save user specific data/settings in ProgramData but in LocalAppData
2

Yeah, that has been like that for a while with every “release”. This was just further confirmation that Deadline was in maintenance mode. When AWS support stopped participating in the forum was another sign of things to come.

Initially, I thought it was senior management doing the usual metrics and questioned free support on the forums, unless it was get everyone paying for EC2 rendering!

1 Like