DISCLAIMER: This is a continuing series detailing the painful story of a DIY render farm build. It is terribly technical and
somewhat frustrating. Those who are unprepared for such “entertainment” are advised to ignore these posts.
This may be the Last Report on the Render Farm. After this there’s probably not much to say about it.
- It works
- It’s running OSX 10.10 without any problem (there is absolutely NO reason to go to Sierra!)
- I am able to write job scripts and execute a number of functions through the interface
- The built-in job script plugins are all a little sad and old, but if I write scripts and submit them as “General” jobs everything is great.
- I have every piece of software that I’d like to use with a farm up and running and responding quite well.
- The whole thing is off the school network and running on it’s own little Ethernet switch without any contact to the outside world, which is just how they like it at school anyway.
- I had to put two machines in someone else’s office and string my own Ethernet cables through the drop ceiling, but no one will ever care about that. This guarantees I will not blow any fuses and no one will know anything about it.
All computers are back in order and the whole thing is running full tilt, rendering fractals right now. This time it’s an hour-long Mandelbox zoom on 8 machines with 36 cores going.
After a week of rendering it’s done almost 9000 frames, which means a few more weeks to finish. So it’s doing everything I need it to do. From here on out I pretty much only need to report on projects that have been completed with it, since it’s not likely I’ll change anything out at this point. Over and out.