Render Farm Build 35

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.

Of course I had neglected to check the logs.  The logs showed that all jobs were received, but that there was nowhere to put the finished render. The log on the echo test actually did print out – in the log file – exactly what was asked.  It was only my unfamiliarity with the Terminal and how the output would be recorded that got me so confused.  So what I was dealing with were bogus pathnames.

failedfailedfailed

Three times a fail because I had actually NOT failed, but failed to realize I had not failed.  What a fail.

First off, I needed underscores in the names, not spaces.  Being on a Mac for so many years spoiled me from having to worry about spaces, but I’ve done enough web work to know what I should be doing.  If untrapped, the spaces just made the scripts fail, as it seemed to end the pathname.  Next, I added hostnames to /etc/hosts file.  This probably did not have as much to do with the problem, but it was a way of making sure Dr. Queue would report to me the easier name “Gog” rather than “10.1.1.2” every time.  This would be very good for debugging later when I started to clone the drives.

Then I changed the pathname in slave.conf from

/tmp= /drqueue/tmp

to

/tmp= /Volumes/drqueue/tmp

This was so the slave would refer to the mounted volume not the local volume.  And a big collective “duh” rose up from the people once this was accomplished.

I also saw that the pathnames in the logs had an additional trailing slash.  I checked the environment variables set in the shell script.  Not there.  I restarted Gog with the new slave.conf and the new /etc/hosts. Where was this extra slash coming from? Running the job again showed a path called:

/Volumes/drqueue/tmp//Lux

I knew that double slash was wrong.  The file should have been called “Lux Test” so I guessed the spaces in the folder name were ending the pathname. I could trap those out, so it did not seem that important.  But what about this double slash?

I found that drqman had sent the double slash with the command for some reason.  I simply removed it from the input box before I sent the job and it didn’t show up in the job script anymore.  Why was it ever there?  Had I accidentally put it there trying to solve some other problem?  I also found that drqman needs a manual “/Volumes/” added to the “Command” line before sending the job. When I did, it seemed to be working!

Hell, yeah!

The job rendered in Lux on Gog, submitted through Cyclops. Dr. Queue was a success! The farm worked!  I needed to test all the other programs, tweak all the other scripts, and clone the drives, but the farm worked!  As of this writing, I could submit giant LuxRender jobs of multiple frames and I would get high quality material a whatever resolution I asked for!

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