3dsmax version check utility?

[ior=0]

Does anyone know how to check what service pack and/or hotfixes are installed onto their Max render slaves (unregistered) without having to go into the UI. Is there a utility or command line that people use?
Thanks

[vlado]

Are they listed in the Control Panel?

Best regards,
Vlado

[ior=0]

um! Not sure which control panel?
The sort of thing I'm after is the dialogue you get in the Backburner manager that has a custom column for "platform" which tells you which version of windows each server is running, such as "windows XP6.1 Build 6701 - service pack 1" (which translates to win7pro 64bit). Funnily enough there isn't an option to tell you which flavour of max the servers are running though!
All I'm just trying to do is make sure that all my render nodes have consistence service packs and hotfixes applied. I just thought there might have been a little gizmo that would check that I didn't know about.
How do people with large farms manage?

[ior=0]

Which control panel did you mean Vlado?

[vlado]

Start menu > Control Panel > Programs and Features; doesn't it list everything 3ds Max-related that's installed, including service packs?

Best regards,
Vlado

[ior=0]

Hi Vlado,
That tells me I have version Max Design 2011 64bit version 13.6.0.118, but not whether that is sp2 or hf4 or whatever.
Do you somewhere that cross references the version number to which patch have been applied, I couldn't find one?

[instinct]

Help -> About 3dsmax lists "13,0 SP2" under release for example

[plastic_]

someone posted this at cgtalk:

versinfo = dotnetclass "System.Diagnostics.FileVersionInfo"
myFI = versinfo.GetVersionInfo  (pathConfig.appendPath (pathConfig.GetDir #maxroot) "3dsmax.exe")
versions = filterString myFI.FileVersion "."

It extracts the version of the 3dsmax.exe file, as shown in the windows file properties.
You have to find out the version numbers of the different service packs, then you can compare them.

Alternatively you could just compare the filesize of 3dsmax.exe, to make sure it's the same on every render node.

[instinct]

Missed the non-ui part...sorry

[ior=0]

Thanks Marc,
unfortunately I'm not a coder, so wouldn't know what to do with that!?
I'm just surprised there wasn't a script or utility knocking around that people with render farms use to interrogate the render-slaves.
Seems a bit strange also that there isn't an easy to find cross reference for version number and patch name. (google being crap or me just being thick!)

[instinct]

You can get the same information in right-click 3dsmax.exe -> Properties -> Details.

For us this usually is not really an issue as the farm is usually kept homogeneous. So we do not install an update here or there...if we roll it out, we roll it out to all.

Regards,
Thorsten

[ior=0]

You can get the same information in right-click 3dsmax.exe -> Properties -> Details.

Yep that gets me 13.6.0.118 too. I just need to find that Autodesk page which has all the version numbers and patch name references now

[plastic_]

Probably there are solutions to this. I have a pretty small farm and do things manually.
I think most people are using custom scripts and batchfiles to manage their farm.
There are also more powerful backburner alternatives. ReFaMo comes to my mind.
The code I posted is a script, it prints the version number as a variable. You can do all kinds of stuff with that, like a autostart or command line script that outputs the version number into some textfile.

[ior=0]

seems someone else was looking for an answer but couldn't find one.
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthre...version+number

seems weird that backburner monitor will give you the windows service pack info and a whole bunch of other stuff but not the current max version?

[instinct]

Well it does not know, simply as that. It has plugins for the major max versions that launch max in the background. But it does not care about hotfixes or service packs to my understanding. You can also install backburner on linux or without max alltogether and rely on commandline jobs only.

Regards,
Thorsten