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I hope that I do not sound like I am complaining too much, but things were somewhat frustrating again this week.  Last weekend, I was able to activate the render clients on quite a few of the computers in the Loew-Brenn lab remotely.  I was consistently able to submit remote jobs, but the renderers kept saying that there were errors.  On Friday, I spent several hours working with Bob to determine what was causing the issue.  We went over many of the configuration settings, starting with attempting to render on the individual local machines.  The clients seemed to work individually, so we started looking at the network permissions for the several shares which files were pulled from.  Permissions were incorrect for one of the shares, so that resolved part of the issue, but it was still quite some time before we were able to get any successful output due to additional cross-referencing of permissions and such.

One of the other fixes that I had to try was re-exporting my Maya scene as a MentalRay binary file, changing some of the options to be more compatible with the current render farm setup.  This did seem to help eliminates several errors that were being returned.  And while I cannot identify the exact fix, just as I was finishing up for the day, I was able to get a successful render.  Well, that is only half true, I guess.  The status on the remote client indicated that the render was finished, but I was unable to find an output image on the network share.  So, I still have some testing to do to actually find the output…

Because of the different surprises I have encountered so far, I am somewhat behind in actually getting to the MentalQueue part of the independent study.  Within the next week, I need to re-assess the timeline I had specified, and I may need to revise my schedule accordingly.

Until next week,
Andrew

4 hours spent this week