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Please Help! I need to use my render farm to do some cooperative renders and for some reason, my network keeps freezing.
I have 7 render nodes installed on a network of Mac Pros. All are installed properly and licenses activated. I have the network manager app and network monitor app installed on the mac that I do all of my work on. I have successfully used the network to render some jobs since upgrading to Maxwell 3. But now, for some reason, I am not able to network render at all. I will check that all of my nodes are running properly, then launch the manager, and then launch the monitor app to start a new cooperative rendering. All of my nodes will show that they are available and ready. But the job is never able to progress past the "submitting job" step. I will go back and check all of my nodes and the will all be frozen. I have to to then force quit each one of them and re-launch the nodes. I have discovered that it is the Network Manager app that is causing the nodes to freeze. All of the nodes will be fine. But as soon as I launch the Manager app, they will all freeze. Nothing has changed on my network.
Please help me figure out what could be causing this to happen. I'm stumped.

What if you start the Manager and go to File>Purge temp files? Then do the same for Monitor. And then start the nodes.

Then test with a very simple scene, no textures, to see if it's network rendering ok.

Unfortunately the nodes are still freezing even after purging all temp files. I'm wondering if I should try re-installing the software?

Have you tried also with all firewalls off?

If you open Maxwell on any of the nodes, what does it say in Console, are they getting the license ok?

Yes, if I open Maxwell on one of the nodes, it does show that it is finding the license ok.

It does really seem like something is now interfering with the communication between Manager and nodes. Does a local node work ok? Have you tried with firewalls off? Anything new installed or updated?

are you certain all nodes are running the same version of maxwell as server?

Gary

Hmm. Yes! The local node renders just fine. It's only the nodes on the network that are freezing. They are all the same version as the manager and monitor. Maxwell 3.
I asked the IT consultant for my office if he has done anything new to our network in the past few weeks. He says he has not.

Sorry for the dumb question. but could you explain a little more about the firewalls and how I would render with a firewall off?

I spoke with my IT consultant and he says there are no firewalls on in my offices internal network. Only for internet.

Ok but our network uses tcp protocol for communication, maybe that still affects it? Can you please also try if you haven't already, to set all nodes and manager to deep debug mode from their prefs. Maybe that gives us a clue.

I don't see deep debug mode any where in any of the preferences.

Success! We finally figured out what was causing the problem. The network switch must have been corrupted after a power outage. I power cycled the switch and everything is working properly again.

Reason nr 712 why network rendering can be tricky
Glad it's working again!