I’m new to Deadline and after digging around through the help files, I can’t seem to find where it is that you set “active” times for certain slaves. I’m not sure whether this exists or not in Deadline.



We are wanting certain slaves to only go active (and accept jobs) at certain times of the day (night time mostly). Other than actually closing the slave service down whilst you use the machine, and start it up again when you leave to go home. Also, ignoring the “screensaver” option that will start to accept render jobs when the machine goes idle. We need a more solid ability to set times for certain machines to be render nodes and other times for them to just ignore the jobs.



Does this feature exist, or is there a way to get this kind of functionality out of Deadline?



Thanks in advance.



Kyle

Hi Kyle,

Deadline doesn't yet have a scheduling system built in. A possible
solution would be to use the Windows scheduling feature to start and
stop the slaves. The slave can be started by scheduling
"c:\deadline\bin\DeadlineSlave.exe" to run at the end of the day, and it can
be shutdown by scheduling "c:\deadline\bin\DeadlineSlave.exe -s" at the
beginning of the day.

We hope to eventually introduce a scheduling system into Deadline, but
we don't have a time line yet for such a feature.

Cheers,
- Ryan

--
--
Ryan Russell
Frantic Films Software
http://software.franticfilms.com/
204-949-0070

Hey Ryan,



Thanks for that. Using the Windows scheduler isn’t too much of a problem, and it seems to be working pretty solidly. It would be pretty awesome if you could group certain nodes, and assign time schedules to them in Deadline. Otherwise, I’ve been really impressed by the software. We’re using a 30-day trial license to test it out, and I’ve been pretty sold on buying it. Having used render farm managers like Qube! before, I am starting to prefer Deadline because of it’s simplicity, but it’s also packed with customizations. I sometimes found Qube! to be quite frustratingly complex at times, when all you require is a straight forward render farm solution.



Though, a linux version of the client software for Deadline (which Qube! does have) would be the icing on the cake!



Cowabunga.



Kyle


PS. You missed out a “bin” in those paths for the DeadlineSlave.exe file. Just in case someone else stumbles on to this post.

Hi Kyle,

We're currently working on porting Deadline over to linux and osx, and we hope to start a beta program in the next month or so. Keep an eye on the website and the forums!

Thanks for catching my typo, I'll modify the post! :)

Cheers,
 - Ryan