October 22, 2009
October 8, 2009
Changing Directions (or maintaining the same direction currently traveled?)
By Andrew at 6:29 PM
September 28, 2009
Sidetracked
By Andrew at 11:57 PM
September 22, 2009
Deep Freeze: Repeating Mistakes?
By Andrew at 11:09 PM
September 12, 2009
Second Week: More Challenges!
By Andrew at 10:16 PM
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
September 7, 2009
First Week Challenges
By Andrew at 12:55 PM
For the first week of my independent study, Bob Landon and I spent around two hours trying to install the RenderPAL software and getting the school’s router to allow communication between my machine and the render server. Although I did not spend much time on the actual render farm, I did learn quite a bit about routing rules, IP address ranges, permission lists, and the headaches of general networking issues.
The installation of the RenderPAL remote client was as simple as a straightforward installer. There were no major surprises, and it seems to work just fine on Windows 7 even. Bob had to set up a user account for me so that I will be able to manage render jobs once I start working with the jobs. I also had to configure the server that I would be managing. Since the ports were the default ports, this setup essentially consisted of inputting the server name. But this was the point where I ran into the block on the wireless VLAN. Once these blocks were resolved, I was able to access the render clients that are in the Loew-Brenn classroom.
The plan for next week is to finish my introduction to the current render farm setup and move on to MentalQueue from there.
2 hours spent this week