Setting up a Dedicated Server for Backburner

[Matt Sugden]

Hi, I've had my ups and downs with Backburner, recently I have gone from having a rock solid network rendering setup, to adding a couple more machines which is now making the whole thing fall over and become unstable again. I guess it's because I'm maxing out my network connections.

 

So obviously a lot of you have more then 5 PCs rendering at a time, how do I go about this? so I can essentially grow my network without limitations. I assume I need some form of dedicated server PC?

 

How do I configure this and do I need to run a different OS etc?

 

Cheers

[ihabkal]

Hi Bewdy,

Setting up a network and maintaining it is very hard. my pointers are to have the same backburner version on all machines. if you install a new version wihout manually uninstalling the previous one it won't update. Always check for new versions as they are full of bugs, but each version performs a little better.

Also a 1 Gibabit switch especially with large files, and get a good one not cheap. Have all large maps and rpcs copied on every machine with paths setup in max to avoid having a bottlneck that could freeze your network.

take out all older machines as they will use your network bandwidth. in my opinion anything with less than 4 cores is not worth having on a renderfarm.

I've had to format a computer a couple of times for no reason other than it not rendering but after a clean install it worked great. If you are using older machines make a clean install and only have max on it.