Render Farm Build 26

DISCLAIMER: This is a continuing series detailing the painful story of a DIY render farm build.  It is terribly technics and
somewhat frustrating.  Those who are unprepared for such “entertainment” are advised to ignore these posts.

I thought I could use OSX 10.9.1 and be OK.

failed

All the Xcode versions I needed to build Dr. Queue require the latest 10.9, not some transitional number. Because who would not upgrade to the latest? That put me in an awkward position – I had to find 10.9.5!  Nothing else!

Then I remembered that when I bought the new cylinder, I had in essence bought a copy of 10.9.5 as a result.  Thus, the Mac app store should let me re-download any purchases.

Hours later, a new and perfectly good copy of 10.9.5.app was on my drive. I used MacPostFactor to copy it to a USB for installation and installed it on the target drive. This could not be going better right now…!  All installed fine.  Next was the prep work:

  1. Xcode 6.1.1 (latest)
  2. Xcode command line tools
  3. Mac ports 2.2.3 (latest)
  4. X-Quartz (probably not needed? No GUI for the slave, but I installed anyway.)
  5. sudo port install scons
  6. Fetched all dependencies! Everything fine!
  7. GIT cloning… For retrieving Dr. Queue source. Source got, no problems!
  8. Added extra protected memory lines in /etc/rc
  9. Built! Scons said it was done. It took only about two hours from a blank drive!

Testing the slave in Terminal showed that yes, indeed, everything turned out just fine.  The slave was running.  Activity Monitor showed it was doing just fine.

Setting up the PowerPC domain controller took at least a month!  And only two hours on the slave!  Could I retire the “fail” stamp?  Now all I had to do was to get them talking.

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