backburner problems once again

[Dave Buckley]

I am experiencing a regular problem with Backburner on some of my render jobs

I am running a small render farm of up to 8 workstations, each with slightly different specifications. When I send a job to render through Backburner, it assigns each task correctly, and each frame renders as I would expect. However, after all of my servers have completed the task, the following error message is displayed

"Server has not received an update from the manager and has timed out; assuming the manager is down.”

Each server then resets itself, then Backburner assigns the next task. When all servers have carried out the assigned task, the same thing happens again and the pattern seems to repeat in this way for the duration of the job

Whilst not a catastrophic problem, as I am still able to fully render my scenes, it is causing a significant delay, as I am sure you can appreciate. The additional time that was spent waiting for servers to restart themselves and re-launch 3DS Max was in the region of 20 hours on a recent job

Any ideas guys? Much appreciated

[BrianKitts]

I've gotten that error before, ended up being a firewall issue that the server could receive jobs and start them, but then wouldn't be able to communicate back to the manager so it would drop from jobs. When I finally traced everything down it ended up needing an extra exception for the Norton firewalls.

 

Although I should mention that at the same time I found out I had another problem that the network subnet mask in that office was opened to 255.255.0.0 instead of the smaller 255.255.255.0 that I've been accustomed to in smaller offices. This was also keeping half of the machines from acquiring jobs, and it was random which machines would pick up jobs because sometimes the machines would boot and recieve a different IP address causing them to sometimes find the manager and sometimes they wouldn't. The second issue may be separate from what you're facing, but I mention it because I'm not sure if it affected me getting the error or not, but it added to the same headache and both got fixed at the same time so I can't say for sure how much each affected each other.

Edited August 17, 2009 by BrianKitts

[theqball]

Are you also rendering on the Manager machine? It is highly recommended that you do NOT render on this machine.

[Dave Buckley]

nope, i have a creative workstation running monitor and manager, and i am sending jobs to 8 different machines acting as render slaves