Backburner woes

[Syclone1]

Ok so thanks to my overly paranoid IT dept at the office they dont want me to have admin rights on the render farm even though Im the only one here using it and if I need them to fix something on it I usually have to take the time to tell them what to do to fix the issue which is entirely ridiculous in my opinion but hey what do I know Ive only been working with this software for close to 20 years and well enough of that or Ill be going in to a rant. Anyway so I want the back burner server and manager running as a service but the local system account on each slave does not have access to the manager or the folders for saving and retrieving files unless I go into the service its self and add my login credentials but that is not an option given the 10 machines and at least 5 services I would have to update on an almost monthly basis. Is there any way I can have them set this up so that I wouldn't run in to access problems?

I want them running as services as there are power issues here and I have the computers set to start up after the power comes back online but need to log-in to each machine to kick over back burner, V-Ray and V-Ray RT applications and if they were services then I wouldn't have to worry about logging in as they would just start running as soon as the OS loads.

Any incite or ideas would be enthusiastically welcomed !

-dave

[Morne]

Or just setup autologon and add backburner stuff into startup. That way you don't need admin access. Now the only thing is, if your IT guys are so paranoid, will they allow autologon on those machines in the 1st place?!?

[Syclone1]

Yes I had thought about that too but unfortunately that is out of the question.

This is getting out of had as after 10 years of having admin rights on the farm and me being the ONLY person that uses and managed it that its all of a sudden an issue now and to make it worse they have denied me access to the server room that the slaves are in. So in the even I have to reboot one of the slaves now, I have to send an email to Houston (Im in Canada) and then wait for them to assign the IT ticket to someone here and then they will have to drive to the R&D office which is separate from all of out offices and then whoever can come in and push the little blue button. So what would take me 90 seconds to walk to the server room, restart the slave and return to my office now will take a good 2 or 3 hours! All of which Ill be sitting at my desk with my feet up doing nothing or close to it depending on which computer goes down...

lol sorry for the rant :P

Or just setup autologon and add backburner stuff into startup. That way you don't need admin access. Now the only thing is, if your IT guys are so paranoid, will they allow autologon on those machines in the 1st place?!?

[Morne]

Maybe you should go above IT's heads? It can help if you put it in terms they understand. 3 Hours doing nothing equals $X down the toilet.
OR, the "boss" is trying to say it's time to look for a new job

[Syclone1]

They wont budge, I have support from the president of the company as well as most of the executive team and still no go, this is one of the few companies where it seems that the company works for IT and not IT working for the company. Ive even complained about the fact my desktop is painfully slow and they see nothing wrong with the logs so all is good. I just work here and the fact Ive been doing this for over 20 years means nothing.

I did a test with my personal laptop V.S. this HP Z820 workstation and from a cold boot, logging in to windows, starting Max up until I can have Max open a file on my laptop its about 50 to 60 seconds, the HP Z820 on the other hand is 16 to 18 minutes. I'm guessing its all the watchdog and antivirus applications and scripts that IT has running in the BG that is slowing me down and driving me out of my mind lol.

[Donald2B]

Your IT department sucks! I don't know what type of paranoia would cause someone to do that other than a power trip. I've had other companies I work for do something similar, but after a month or two of dealing with all the issues and my records of the lengthened down time, things usually get changed pretty quick.

Unfortunately, things are kind of difficult with renderfarms and rights. It's a down right PITA! I can't think of anything off the top of my head that will help you out in this situation without some type of admin control over the farm. Otherwise it will all need to be remotely done and scripted from within your IT department.

That really sucks!

EDIT: Would they allow you to move to a more renderfarm management type setup, like Deadline? That way you can control the farm from within Deadline and work things out that way? It's not a cheap option, but it's an option.

[Syclone1]

Thanks Troy, that was going to be my next question, what alternatives to BB that work that I might be able to use?

EDIT: Would they allow you to move to a more renderfarm management type setup, like Deadline? That way you can control the farm from within Deadline and work things out that way? It's not a cheap option, but it's an option.

[tvc15]

I deal with something similar where I need add my credentials to backburner and vray services so they can save to network folders, but then we're required to change our password every 90 days.
So every 90 days I Remote Desktop to the dozen renderslaves and run a bat file with the below in it to assign the new password to the services:

sc.exe config "backburner_srv_200" obj= "yourlogin@company.com" password= "password"
sc stop backburner_srv_200
sc start backburner_srv_200
sc.exe config "vrayrtspawner" obj= "yourlogin@company.com" password= "password"
sc stop vrayrtspawner
sc start vrayrtspawner
sc.exe config "VRaySpawner 2015" obj= "yourlogin@company.com" password= "password"
sc stop "VRaySpawner 2015"
sc start "VRaySpawner 2015"

Place your login and password in the appropriate places inside the quotes.
This is assuming you can remote desktop into the slaves.
If you want to reboot the slave you can command line: shutdown/r (the /r is for restart).
Hope that helps.

[Syclone1]

Cool beans, Ill run this by IT and see what they think. Thank you. They did just allow me specific rights to start and stop my services, the paranoia is crazy lol.

BTW I know it can take a few seconds or so to shut down services, does all of that go into a single bat file or does it need to be a separate bat file for each service?

I deal with something similar where I need add my credentials to backburner and vray services so they can save to network folders, but then we're required to change our password every 90 days.
So every 90 days I Remote Desktop to the dozen renderslaves and run a bat file with the below in it to assign the new password to the services:

sc.exe config "backburner_srv_200" obj= "yourlogin@company.com" password= "password"
sc stop backburner_srv_200
sc start backburner_srv_200
sc.exe config "vrayrtspawner" obj= "yourlogin@company.com" password= "password"
sc stop vrayrtspawner
sc start vrayrtspawner
sc.exe config "VRaySpawner 2015" obj= "yourlogin@company.com" password= "password"
sc stop "VRaySpawner 2015"
sc start "VRaySpawner 2015"

Place your login and password in the appropriate places inside the quotes.
This is assuming you can remote desktop into the slaves.
If you want to reboot the slave you can command line: shutdown/r (the /r is for restart).
Hope that helps.

[tvc15]

All in a single bat file, it waits for one command to finish before going to the next and takes 20-30 seconds. I suppose there is a way to send the bat file to the render slaves from a workstation but I haven't figured that one out yet.

[Syclone1]

sweet, thanks for the info. Im trying to get a demo of Refamo as well to evaluate, would be nice to be able to push an update to the entire farm at once.