AWS Thinkbox Discussion Forums

AWS portal & forwarding licenses

Hi Guys,

I’m just back off my holiday and I have encountered a stumbling block in setting up AWS cloud rendering in Deadline 10. I’ve installed the OnPrem service and anything involved in the AWSPortalLink setup. I’ve noted that when you create your infrastructure it creates a cloud formation and from there it creates an initial EC2 instance for your license forwarder. Which I can see running through the license forwarders panel in DL10. My assumption was that this forwarder instance in EC2 would forward on the license details to each of the EC2 slaves created, however when I create a slave the license column for that slave is set to License-Free mode. Which means it is not receiving access to our license server.

I had previously posted about the slave not being able to access our houdini license server but in general it just plain cannot access our Thinkbox license server. I am certain I have put the settings in the correct way. I’ve input the correct Thinkbox License server IP Address and port and have no clue as to why it can’t pick it up, but there may be something in the setup I’ve missed or a more advanced user would know

I had the idea of ssh’ing into the forwarder/slaves to see if they can see our server but I can’t find a way of doing this as I can’t assign a keypair to an already running instance. Is there a way of doing this?

So, In summary my questions are:

  1. What is the procedure for forwarding our thinkbox licenses for EC2 slaves to be able to use them?
  2. Is there a way I can ssh into EC2 slaves and check they can reach our license server?

Thank you for your continued help.

Kind regards,
Tom

Hey,

The License Forwarder is not actually used for Deadline Licensing, but rather is used to forward third party licensing requests. In order to use your on-premise Deadline License Server on the AWS portal Slaves you will need to change their licensing mode from Usage-Based to Standard, and configure your AWS Portal Settings by providing the IP and ports of your local License Server. Sounds like you’ve already done the second part, so you probably just need to change the licensing mode for the Slaves. There are a couple ways you can do this:

  1. If you enable Dynamic Licensing, which can be found from the Monitor under Configure Repository Options -> Usage Based Licensing, you can provide the number of Deadline licenses you have, and how many slaves you are willing to let use Usage Based Licensing. If this is enabled, then the Slave’s Licensing mode setting will be ignored, and it will always try to use Standard licensing first. If the Slave is unable to retrieve a standard license, it will check if there are enough Slaves using standard licenses (specified by the threshold you set). If there are, it will check if the UBL threshold has not yet been met, and only then will it try to use Usage Based Licensing. Once you have set this setting you will need to restart the Slaves in order for them to pick up the change.

  2. Use Auto-Configuration ( docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produ … onfig.html )

  3. Manually change the Slave’s licensing mode to standard. You would need physical access to the machines to accomplish this, so it’s probably the least preferable.

I would recommend you try Dynamic Licensing or Auto-Configuration.

Hope this helps!

Hey Tom,

  1. By default the instances spin up in UBL mode, since you don’t have UBL setup they would go to License-Free mode if there is 2 or less render nodes connected. You need to enable Dynamic Licensing so that the render node can switch between Standard and UBL licensing. This setting is located in Tools > Configure Repository Options > UBL. Also make sure when you setup your AWS Portal settings that you are pointing the the right ports. Most likely your licenses server is 27008 or 2708 unless you specified otherwise. You’ll need to restart the Slave for these settings to kick in.

  2. Yes, you would use the License Forwarder to login to the render nodes. To do this you need to run a python or command job that adds the public key to the slaves authorized keys file. If you select Maintenance as the job type it will run on all the nodes connected to your farm. I’ve attached a python script that can help with this.

Regards,

Charles
appendkey.zip (327 Bytes)

Ah I see, I’ll give this a go and get back to you.

As always thank you for your swift reply :smiley:

Thanks,
Tom

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