Lost irmaps and windows networks

[tricky]

I regularly use backburner for rendering animations from saved irmaps. I am regularly getting a situation where every few frames, the render is dark - all the textures are there, but the irmap 'solution' hasn't been getting through the network (even if I select 'include maps' when submitting the job).

I have put this down to my shared network drives not reconnecting properly when my render slaves are rebooted. We have four shared network drives, identically mapped to each of our slaves - one for maps, models, work etc. When I look at the drives, it quite often says that they are disconnected. When I double click them, they connect just fine. It seems to be this that prevents backburner from rendering frames correctly with saved solutions.

1) Why are the bitmaps getting through, but not the irmap?
2) Does anyone share this problem?
3) How can I 'force' XP to automatically reconnect the drives properly on reboot?

[RErender]

Are you running the backburner servers as services? XP has a "feature" the prevents the connections from refreshing.

[tricky]

For simplicity, I have backburner set up in the start folder so that when I turn the render slaves on, backburner auto-starts. However, even if I manually start backburner server, it will not work if the network drives read as 'disconnected' (even though they are not)

The problem seems to be with XP, not vray as such. I just wonder why the bitmaps get through, whereas the solution (coming from the same networked drive) does not.

[Dman3d]

We have the same problem too. The drives show disconnect as if they temporarily lost connection but they are not after whatever it is happens. We have a mix of Win2K and XP slaves. Any suggestions?

[jujubee]

Yeah. I posted several times regarding this. It's a problem with NetBIOS as it's an old protocol.

One solution is to disable NetBIOS on all your adapters (right click your adapter\tcpip\properties\advanced\WINS\DiasableNet BIOS over TCP/IP)

then manually edit your hosts file on each comp to reflect your computer name and IP. It's located at:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Once I created this file, I copied it across the network to make life easier. Since then I haven't had any problems.

The alternative method for a larger farm recommended by a friend (+5 comps) is to:

1) get a DNS server such as win 2003
2) use opene source DNS type software such as BIND
3) Someone on the forum recommended SAMBA.

[Dman3d]

Many thanks juju, will speak with IT using this info.

[jujubee]

Your welcome - I just hope it helps.

In a separate note, a simple thing like a faulty network cable could also cause packet issues during large transfers of data.

It also happens that switches can deteriorate/go bad - one of my friends that did Bill Gates home security system (I name drop here because this guy knows his networking) absolutely hates Netgear products - says hes had three of their switches bomb on him during the past year. He said general consumer switches (even the gigabit ones) are really not designed to put up with high transfer loads such as DR. His recommendation was spending the extra money and buy Dell Switches.

If the NETBIOS disabling doesn't do the trick, you may have one of the above issues. Eliminate any unecessary daisy-chaining of switches and try direct connections to your main one to narrow down what could be wrong. Also, ping your computers and look for any packet loss. I actually just experienced this part tonight - was causing Max to crash out.

[jujubee]

Update.

To clarify, my networking issue was with NETBIOS at first ( I was getting disconnects several times a day) - that part was solved and worked great with no drops. A couple weeks later, I developed a separate networking issue with the same generic error message.

At first I thought it was my Gigabit Netgear Switch - but it turns out it was my Gigabit DLink Switch that had gone faulty.

I talked with a few more networking people, and the all recommended against Netgear, Belkin, Dlink, and other generic brands. I've been told by several people the Dell makes the best business class, then for medium networks is Linksys and SMC.

I just picked up a SMC Gig Switch with Jumbo Packets - the network traffic is twice as fast and everything seems to be working smoothly. A little premature to judge - but I must say I'm pretty impressed.

[jujubee]

Triple response time.

I still had some issues with the network drive dropping after rendering even though alot of this has cleared up. A dedicated network drive for textures works best to prevent disconnects. If you insist on running DR on a slave that houses your textures, several peopla have recommended using a 'low priority' startup script for Max. One can be found on the the Scriptspot website.

[Dynedain]

Low priority network rendering script