Render Farm Build 33

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.

Finally I got the bottom of some of the configuration issues.  Once more I suggest that a serious Linux/Unix head would probably laugh at my fumbling.  These seem like obvious fixes now.  For one, the job script had a line called  “ENGINE_PATH” which only said “luxconsole.” That seemed suspicious.   Any “path” should be a proper path, yes?  And just “luxconsile” is not a real path.   If I put in the proper path to the real luxconsole, would I get a render?

/Applications/LuxRender/LuxRender.app/Contents/MacOS/luxconsole

failed

Well, hand coding the job script did not work. So I dragged this into the terminal on Gog:

/Applications/LuxRender/LuxRender.app/Contents/MacOS/luxconsole Volumes/drqueue/tmp/Lux Test.lxs

That is essentially the pathname to Luxconsole, a space, and then the pathname of the Lux Test file I wanted to render.  Luxconsole immediately opened and the lux file rendered.  No problem!  Somehow that command was not getting to the slave.

Then I noticed that the job script sent the job to /drqueue/tmp and not Volumes/drqueue/tmp.  Could I just tag in “Volumes…?” on the Command line in drqman? Or should I edit the job script template that drqueue uses to create commands to send the slaves?

failed

I tried these methods, and they failed.  But all of this fumbling did point to the answer. The job script was somehow not executing properly on the slaves. The paths were wrong and the information the slave was getting from the master was pointing to nonexistent directories.  No wonder nothing was happening.  Experiments with scripts using “echo” would probably confirm whether or not the master was behaving, as would my old friend the shell script we call

echo "Hello World!"

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