User avatar
By RobMitchell
#344619
** Edit: Just realised I put this in the bug reports by mistake. If the admins/moderators wish to move this, please do. **

Hi everyone.

For a while at work we've had one host machine (Dell Workstation) and one node (3D Workstation) which has worked fine. Recently we bought 2 more machines (Render01 and Render02) to add to the render farm and bought new node licenses to go with them. During this upgrade we swapped the Dell Workstation and 3D Workstation around, swapping the licenses over with them. We've also installed Maxwell onto Render 01 and Render 02, using the new licenses we bought especially for them.

Now when we fire up the network, Dell Workstation and 3D Workstation only find themselves and do not connect to anything else. Render 01 and Render 02 connect to eachother and can share rendering, but they do not see the host machine or the Dell Workstation.

In short:
- Original license moved from Dell Workstation to 3D Workstation
- Original node license moved from 3D Workstation to Dell Workstation (essentially swapping their roles)
- 3D Workstation and Dell Workstation do not find themselves on the Network as they did before
- Render 01 machine added to the network with new node license
- Render 02 machine added to the network with new node license
- Render 01 and 02 will find eachother on the network, but cannot see Dell Workstation or 3D Workstation

I'll be sending this as an e-mail to support as well, but do any of you guys have an idea as to why this might have happened?

Thanks for reading.
Last edited by RobMitchell on Fri Jul 08, 2011 5:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
By dmeyer
#344621
How is your network set up?

Maxwell Network will not auto-find nodes in different VLANs.

Also, as a general rule, you should have 1 master license file that contains all of your licenses, and install that on every machine.

Another thing to remember, is the way the Maxwell license file is treated by your OS. When a particular user launches a job for the first time, Maxwell looks in their user directory for a license.txt. If it does not find one, it copies the one from the application directory to the user directory. Unfortunately, if it does find one in the user directory, it does NOT do the copy. Thus, to truly clean a machine of an old license you must manually delete the license.txt from every users directory on that machine, and then place the new license.txt in the application directory. We've run across this problem when updating render farm machines that have several user accounts, old stale licenses remaining in the system.
User avatar
By RobMitchell
#344622
Hi, dmeyer. Thanks for responding so quickly.

I think before anything else, having the master license available on each machine is a good first thing to try. How do you go about doing this? Do you have the node license in the Documents/Maxwell Render directory and the master license in the C:\ directory?
By dmeyer
#344623
RobMitchell wrote:Hi, dmeyer. Thanks for responding so quickly.

I think before anything else, having the master license available on each machine is a good first thing to try. How do you go about doing this? Do you have the node license in the Documents/Maxwell Render directory and the master license in the C:\ directory?
In multi-machine environements there should be only 1 license.txt anywhere, ever.

From where you are:

Step 1: Delete every license.txt on every machine. Both in the application dir and the users dir's.
Step 2: Take the license info that NL sent you from all 4? of your license files, paste all 4 blurbs into one text file. Save it as license.txt. You can even add in extra information as long as you comment it out. I do this for version control of our license.txt here.
Step 2: Place this new license.txt in the application dir of every machine, and make it read-only. Do not manually place it in each user dir.
User avatar
By RobMitchell
#344624
Aah, so you can add to the same license? Interesting. I think that's what might well be the problem... So if over the years of using Maxwell we've gotten 3 different licenses (1: 1 standard license. 2: 1 node license. 3: 1 node license) at different times, we should just add all 3 different licenses into one file? Will go through your guide and report back. :)
By dmeyer
#344625
RobMitchell wrote:Aah, so you can add to the same license? Interesting. I think that's what might well be the problem... So if over the years of using Maxwell we've gotten 3 different licenses (1: 1 standard license. 2: 1 node license. 3: 1 node license) at different times, we should just add all 3 different licenses into one file? Will go through your guide and report back. :)
Yep.

I think in 2.5 or so they added a way to do this via the GUI, but the GUI was just writing it into the text file.

Its easier in multi-machine environments to just make the file manually.

For example, our license file looks something like this...doing this from memory but you'll get the idea:






Code: Select all
#### MAXWELL LICENSE FILE:  Original License #####

blah blah blah

#### END LICENSE FILE



#### MAXWELL LICENSE FILE:  Licenses from that time i bought more nodes #####

blah blah blah

#### END LICENSE FILE



#### MAXWELL LICENSE FILE:  Licenses when i loaded up after world cup promo. España victoria

blah blah blah

#### END LICENSE FILE

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