network render question

[invisiblecities]

I am thinking of network rendering through a VPN and the guy who is to set it up wants to know "does the manager talk to rendering machines through SMB or through TCP port 7504?"
... means nothing to me .. any ideas or is it a terrible idea?

Adam

[paulison]

i work from home and used to send jobs to the office renderfarm via a vpn connection.

Everything worked fine except that it is very slow for large jobs - can take 30 mins to send a job!

basically you want the manager and renderfarm machines to be on the same network. if you load up the backburner monitor program on your workstation and enter the IP address of the machine that is running the manager on the other end of the VPN connection, then if everything is set up correctly, you should be able to bring up the list of jobs currently rendering. If it isnt working, then you wont be able to connect to the manger.

Whatever the IT guy said sounds like hes trying to blow you away with his leet knowedge instead of just making it simple for you :P

actually now that i've read it again, it sounds like he is trying to find out what port to open up to allow the servers and manager to connect to each other. If this means that you have a manager at one end and the rendering machines at the other, I WOULDNT DREAM OF DOING IT THIS WAY!!!! (unless you have an internet connection on par with your LAN and with unlimited traffic). If you send the job to the manager, it then distributes the job to each rendering machine. Can you imagine a job that is around 100Mb in size being sent 100 times through VPN to the 100 renderfarm machines on the other end of the VPN connection (thats like 10Gb of traffic over your internet connection). So make sure the manager and servers are on the same network if possible unless you are ridiculously rich. Connecting to the manager via VPN is quick. sending jobs to the manager via VPN is slow, but you only have to do it once unless you amend something

Hope that helps anyway. i'm assuming you are thinking of strip rendering or for frames of an animation over many machines.

Someone please correct me if im wrong, because the above is just based on my experiences