[deadalvs]

nice, dude !

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i'm still fighting with the infinite loop when accessing win / mac together...

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deadalvs

[deadalvs]

has anybody an idea about the SL... if entered SL 15... does every slave render up to SL 15 and then send it or is just the final image, merged, SL 15 ?

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deadalvs

[kirkt]

nice, dude !

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i'm still fighting with the infinite loop when accessing win / mac together...

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deadalvs

What infinite loop are you getting? When you try to connect? If so, try connecting by hitting the "Options" button on the right side of the Network tab window on your manager machine (oppposite the "Connect" button). When the Options window comes up, explicitly enter the IP of the Manager machine. See if this works.

I just finally got Thomas An's test scene to successfully be distributed. I had to Unload and Reload every f'ing bitmap in each Projector, but once I did that in Studio, saved the MXS to a new file and then added that file as a job, it worked. I used the Test file distributed with Maxwell V 1.1 and did the monkeying, saved it in the same "Content" directory that the original file came in with the V 1.1 distribution and it seems to be rendering. I sent the test as a 100 px x 100 px render to SL target 10 as an initial test. I will send the full 500x500 next. Incidentally, it seems the dual 1 GHz G4 is outdoing the Intell Core Duo - UNIVERSAL BINARY PLEASE!!!

kirk

[deadalvs]

What infinite loop are you getting? When you try to connect? If so, try connecting by hitting the "Options" button on the right side of the Network tab window on your manager machine (oppposite the "Connect" button). When the Options window comes up, explicitly enter the IP of the Manager machine. See if this works.

did this, the manager is not the problem... the servers are the problem. on the mac manager, the mac server appears stable but a pc server gets the loop. vice versa, on a pc manager, the pc servers go ok, but the mac server gets the loop...

so pc manager - pc servers works... ! ((mac manager - mac server didn't work yet because the server froze every time))

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deadalvs

[superbad]

kirkt, thanks so much for that procedure. I was having the problem where "Add Job" does nothing. Astonishingly, cooperative rendering is currently working on 4 machines on my network! Half of those machines are ropey as hell, so I'm impressed it's working at all. Would never have figured it out without your help. These are PCs, not Macs, I found this thread through a search. Should be a sticky on the front page.

[kirkt]

kirkt, thanks so much for that procedure. I was having the problem where "Add Job" does nothing. Astonishingly, cooperative rendering is currently working on 4 machines on my network! Half of those machines are ropey as hell, so I'm impressed it's working at all. Would never have figured it out without your help. These are PCs, not Macs, I found this thread through a search. Should be a sticky on the front page.

Nice Superbad - I was having that problem too because i was trying to add the job from the server machine instead of the manager machine (although the directions say you can add jobs from any server). I would add and no job would show up in the jobs field. Sweet that is is working on multiple machines, PC or Mac.

So, given Sandy Koufax's demo regarding combining mulitple MXIs with different seeds, the question is, can I try to run mulitple Windows Virtual Machines using Parallels desktop for MacIntels and virtually network them all. Since each machine would really only need to do a little work, I wonder if it would be a way to cheat the system on a single machine....

So many things to break, so little time.

rock on.

kirk

[kirkt]

As another little minor follow up - remember to flag your thread count to ZERO if you want all processors on all nodes to participate in the network render.

[Mr. Gog]

kirkt:

It's working here.: 2/ g5 dual 1.8 and 4/ imacs 1.8

Thanks again.

[kirkt]

kirkt:

It's working here.: 2/ g5 dual 1.8 and 4/ imacs 1.8

Thanks again.

Nice! Now we have to see if anything is actually happening re: speed increases. If you multinode people have some free time, it would be cool to see some tests with a standard scene and the times for a given SL with increasing nodes in the farm. Especially folks like Mr.Gog who are not mixing Intels and Power PCs - I am again getting teh distinct impression that Maxwell is not very Rosetta friendly. I will do some tests over the weekend to see what bottleneck Rosetta creates on my MacBook Pro compared to my home G4 Dual 1 GHz PPC.

Well, it's poker night tonight. I suck at poker but I am good at drinking cheap beer. With two kids under 5, and a free pass for the night, this is kinda special time. have a great weekend all.

kirk

[Mr. Gog]

MXI_DISTRIBUTION_WAITING

What's this?...?
Which seeting have to be set?

[kirkt]

This means that the manager is waiting for your other render nodes to finish - once thay are all finished the MXIs will be combined into the final image. I assume you are seeing this in the manager Viewer Network tab in purple text. Ultimately all of the nodes should finish and report "Success" in Green Text.

[Mr. Gog]

I got that message on mxcl server (terminal).
I don't see any results, not mxi.

[Mr. Gog]

It's working!!!!
Real Fine.

The problem was the network disk. No other way as kirkt said.

[kirkt]

FOlks - with respect to designating a NETWORK DRIVE as your directory for targeting the rendered image and the .mxi files, remember that OSX's built-in "Personal File Sharing" in System Preferences > Sharing allows you to designate a computer to be accessible to other Macs over a network (or firewire). So, you can create a folder on a local machine, give everyone read and write permission, turn on Personal File Sharing and then connect all of your remote machines to the "host" that has sharing turned on.

You connect by using CMD-K in the finder and typing in the IP of the "host machine. You will be asked for a password (if that is set up) and the volume you wish to mount as a shared drive. Mount the drive that has the folder you set up (with the correct permissions) and you are good to go. I am doing this at home with the MacBook Pro and a dual G4 1 GHz PowerPC over my "intranet" (home router). It is working well. I also created 3 little Apple Scripts to make launcing Server mode, Manager mode and Viewer a simple double click.

now let's see how much speed we gain with our Mac render farms!

Anyone out there running OSX server? Care to comment on the potential for using XGrid for distributing computing duties over a Mac grid?

[deadalvs]

Anyone out there running OSX server? Care to comment on the potential for using XGrid for distributing computing duties over a Mac grid?

aaah, i'd like to be that person... !

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deadalvs