Distibuted Rendering: nothing happens

[zeromancer1972]

Hi folks!

I hope you can tell me everything about problems that may occured to you and the solving of these.
I have the problem that the DR does not send the jobs to the machines.
The status column in the DR settings overview says nothing and there is nothing rendered at all.
I got DR set up in former times, but now (after a re-install of max and vray) I am not able to get this working. My machines have the spawner installed (but not running!). The services say "Some services are started and shut down immediately when they are idle. They will be started if needed." - thats seems to be the point, even if I send those jobs you could not find the spawner running in the processes overview.

Q: is that true about spawner just running when needed?
Q: are there any options I didn't figure out at that point?

Remember: I got this running already - just reinstalled and now it won't work

Please let be participate your knowlegde

[ravexl]

I assume you're setting the spawner to run on the other machines as a service on boot?

I've had no luck with this method in the past and after many frustrating attempts, I realized the clients that ran as service wouldn't work, yet the ones I launched manually, or put the spawner.exe in the startup group, worked flawlessly...

Do your machines respond when the exe is loaded manually?

[zeromancer1972]

ravexl, i haven't tried to start it manually, but i got the spawner running on one machine!
but the new problem is: on the other machine this task could not be started correctly. this causes spawner to start itself everytime again - i stopped counting the processes at about 100... killer-app!

i now try to deinstall and kill all files of vray in order to get it working properly again... hang on guys!



//edit - got it working

thanks to all who visited my thread
thank you ravexl

[ravexl]

Glad to hear it zero...

I actually revisited the spawner service after reading your thread, and it worked the first try... works great now. I set all machines to it now and no issues.

Glad to hear yours is up and running again, very strange. It's scary to think what I'd do without it! heh

[zeromancer1972]

Well I don't really NEED the DR, but it is very comfortable to have the load spread over several machines.

For all the others who suffer from strange spawner behavior too:
Be careful while running the DR Wizard.
If you have the following scenario:

- Spawner running as a servie, but not working properly
- DR Wizard run and set up with the "run as service" option

DO NOT CHECK "start spawner now" in the wizard's options!!!!
I got at least 100 instances of spawner running - the killer for your OS.

This is the way to "clean up" your vray system:

- Run the uninstall_VRSpawn_service_50.bat residing in your max directory
- always ignore the error messages of spawner, the will occcurr permantently, so dont even try to click "ok".
- restart your machine, the service shouldn't run anymore
- delete all vray files from max's directory (see help for all required files)
- reinstall vray
- run the Wizard again, check "start as service", DO NOT CHECK "start spawner now"
- restart your machine

-> ALL IS WORKING FINE