Basically just need a little thing in Launcher that detects whether or not an Artist Workstation has been idle for X minutes. Dunno why this isn't in Deadline already actually, but it would make for a quick and easy fix to at least the shops not wanting to write custom stuff to do this.
While it would at least be a simple solution, it would of course not be the best solution, but as I have been working on a full solution I have started to realize that this cannot easily be contained in Deadline. The most ideal solution to start a Slave on a Workstation would be to wait for X minutes of idle time, restart the machine, auto-login as "Render" and just let slave kick off.
The solution I am working out is probably just going to be a small app/service running in the BG on the machines that waits for that condition to be met, pushes a registry key that forces the machine to autologin and then restarts the machine. Upon login I have a GPO that then removes that autologin so that when an artist comes back and sits down at the workstation he can logoff and the machine won't immediately log back in as "Render" for him. Still though, that is quite the process, but it is rather required to get an ideal rendering environment.
In other news, I was hoping to use Pulse to tie in and do this, alas Pulse doesn't actually check the machine idle, it only checks to see if Deadline Slave is running a job and then so long as it isn't it shuts down the machine, which, won't really work for Workstations that artists are working on in the middle of the day.
Just my roundabout way of pushing for a new feature in Deadline.
Joe