AWS Thinkbox Discussion Forums

Strange slave behavior.

Hi,



I’m getting the following popup error message from 3D Studio Max on slave machines. This only happens once in a while. At first it was only happening on one slave, and thought the problem was with the 3D Studio Max install, but now it has appear on 5 slaves. It only happens sometimes, but I’m not sure when or why.



Here’s the message.



Dialog Title:“3dsmaxcmd.exe - Unable To Locate Component”



Dialog Message:“This application has failed to start because nrapiTools.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem.”



Deadline Slave fails to close the dialog, and the slave appears to stall.



Here is what happen last night on a job. In the task queue for the job it reports that 5 slaves are still rendering (duration for task was 16 hours). But, in the slaves list window it shows that all slaves are “Idle”.



Why does it say that slaves are rendering on a task, but the slave list shows them as idle?



Requeue task does appear to work.



Thanks,



Mathew Foscarini

Technical Director

Crush, Inc.

Toronto

Hi Mathew,



I believe the nrapiTools.dll error can occur if the backburner directory (ie: C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Backburner) is not in the path. Deadline uses 3dsmaxcmd.exe to verify the max installation, but 3dsmaxcmd.exe will fail if it cannot find nrapi20.dll or nrapiTools.dll, which are both in the backburner directory. Adding the backburner directory to the path should fix the problem.



For the “lost task” problem, it sounds like the slave lost track of the task it was rendering. While we have done our best to ensure slaves do not lose tasks, it can still occassionally happen, and the problem is usually the result of a slave crashing during rendering. Is it possible to post a few logs for one or two of the slaves that lost the task? Ideally, we would like to look at the part where the slave went from rendering the task to where it was idle. If the slave crashed, this might be spread out over two logs. The logs can be found in c:\deadline\logs on each slave machine.



Thanks,



Ryan Russell

Frantic Films Software

http://software.franticfilms.com/

(204)949-0070

I believe the nrapiTools.dll

error can occur if the

backburner directory (ie:

C:\Program

Files\Autodesk\Backburner) is

not in the path. Deadline uses



I checked on the slave, and the path is defined in the windows search path.



Wouldn’t this error happen everytime if the path was missing. This error only happens from time to time.



It does appear to me to be a 3D Studio Max problem, but is it possible for Deadline to detect the popup window, and click the “ok” button.

Thanks for the logs. It looks like the slave lost the connection to the repository machine when it was working on that particular task. We’ve done extensive testing situations like these by pulling out the network cable at random times, but it looks like a few cases have slipped through the cracks. We’ll try to reproduce the problem, though I know that won’t be easy. :slight_smile:



Regarding the popup, it doesn’t look like Deadline can handle it (yet). It might be because Deadline looks for windows from 3dsmax.exe and not 3dsmaxcmd.exe, so we’ll likely have to add in that special case.



Cheers,

  • Ryan

Thanks Ryan,



Your technical support is A+.



Mathew Foscarini

Technical Director

Crush, Inc.

Toronto

I’ve been seeing this error msg on a few slaves, ensuring a backburner install via “repair” and then rebooting to ensure the path is set correctly is correcting it. Thanks for the info, Ryan.

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