monitor performance remotely

[glorybound]

Now that I got my 5 WS render farm singing is there a way I can monitor the performance remotely? Google returned nothing. The V-Ray message window share when something drops off, but I would like to see all 6 workstations churning away at 100%... I want to see 44 bars a pretty green

[3LP]

http://www.ixor3d.com/refamo.htm

[simmsimaging]

refamo looks good, but I find it hard to justify the cost versus VNC. I know it's not end of the world pricing, but every time you turn around it's $100-200 for a plugin or utility or what have you. Gotta draw a line somewhere. I find using vnc pretty easy, and with a $5 app I can actually monitor my farm from my iphone while playing Xbox upstairs

b

[egz]

I used to use VNC and then later Remote Desktop through Hamachi, but now I only use LogMeIn Pro and LogMeIn Ignition for all remote stuff. I often work away from my main workstation and renderfarm, and LogMeIn works great for me. I've worked on scenes and set up multiple renders from a different city, and it almost feels like you are working locally, even in 3ds max. A plus is that you don't need to mess with any network NAT settings/VPN/Hamachi etc. since LogMeIn creates its own secure connection. I use the pro version because of the built in file transfer, but if you don't need that you can probably do everything you need with the free version.

And there's an iPhone app as well

One potential problem: Autodesk did something to 3ds max 2010, so the modeling ribbon and the new "fancy" file menu don't work in LogMeIn. But if you use 2009 it works great.

[arobbert]

I use refamo. Remote access is not it's real strength since that can be done easily for free. It works very well for starting and shutting down a farm remotely with two clicks. You can take one look at it and tell what all your nodes are doing which makes it easy to identify a missing node during distributed rendering. The remote execute of commands also works very well and is easy to use. I can easily kill or start a task on my whole farm with a few clicks.
I use this with logmein to control my farm when I'm out of town. I can open one window and control all my nodes.

I agree the price is painful but it works better than anything else for remote shutdown and startup which is a critical function for me. I bought it when they ran an Xmas special.

[joconnell]

Using logmein free here - works fairly well but as a paid app, gotomypc had far more fluid interaction for me. I'm using vnc for local stuff then logmein and hamachi from outside of work - oe of the few things I get proper use of my broadband line with.

[glorybound]

remote

I use hamachi (log into my main office machine) with remote desktop (from my main PC to the slaves), but I guess my question wasn't understood. I just want to ctrl-alt-del and see that all my slaves are running 100%.

[joconnell]

Getcha - something like this is along the lines but not perfect - http://www.monitortools.com/product/wincpu/ - you want a network version of task manager.

[OZRAY]

For those of you that said that ReFaMo's is too expensive don't know how powerful and time saver this tool is. OMG for up to 3-5 rendernode ok maybe it's not essencial but more then that (we currently have 36 dualquad xeon in the farm) this is a none sense to not buy this tool! So much time saved for me. When you need to know if your renders are still calculating on the farm you have to log in one by one with VNC or RDP OR you turn your eyes to the right (on the second monitor) blink it and THAT'S it! You know if something goes bad and stop rendering or if everything goes well. The other powerful feature that I can no more leave without it is the remote command. When installing a new release of VRay for exemple, I put it on a shared folder and send a command with ReFaMo to install it at the same time on every rendernode! Or if I need to kill the spawner or start it it take me 2 secondes to start the spawner on our 36 rendernodes. When I'm not at work my best friend to have a eye on the production in the farm is: My hamachi VPN, ReFaMo and Backburner.

Regards,