BB 3rd time lucky

[ior=0]

I've been having intermittent network rendering problems for a while, sometimes they will sometimes they won't. But there doesn't seem to be any consistency to nail this problem.

Setup: max 9 & BB 2007.0.1 on all nodes (1 ws - 2 slaves)
XPpro sp2 on all but one which as XP home (on 1 slave, but I don't think this should be an issue)
Vray 1.50sp1 (dongle)

So today one of the my many renders fails (I actually watch the slave do the IR pass and render the job), but when it comes to save the file to the workstation it errors: BB monitor flags this error:-
error 1 "The specified network path is no longer available (0x40)" - even though it's been saving and loading to it all day.

It then kicks in the retry of the same job - I watch it do the IR pass and complete the render, when it finishes BB monitor flags this error:-
error 2 "[vray]error reading HDRI rgbe data from file (unc path to workstation)" - again its been using this file no problem on other jobs during the day and in the past.

3rd time lucky, BB starts the 3rd retry - I watch it do the IR pass and complete the render, now it saves okay? I don't get it, why does it fail on 2 different things and then does it no problem. Nothing has changed it the same BB job.

I get this problem a lot with my nodes but have never been able to pin it down. Is it BB, VRAY or my network and how do I fix it?

thx.

[vlado]

I doubt that this is a V-Ray problem, as V-Ray does not really care where the files are stored - it just uses the regular Windows functions for accessing files; it is the job of the OS to tansfer all the information across the network.

There have been others with similar issues and sometimes it is a router problem; at other times it might be a problem of the file server OS (I know some people have resorted to using a Linux system for storing their files); maybe others will share their experiences as well.

Best regards,
Vlado

[ior=0]

Thanks for the reply Vlado, I'm glad to hear it isn't VRAY, I didn't really think it was.
Any network guru's out there have any advice?
My router is a Dlink DSL-G604T if that helps.

thx

[ior=0]

I may have found the cause, it seems my NICs have an energy saving function that enables them to power off! This may have been causing the connections to drop thereby confusing BB.
It might not save global warming but has seemed to have stabilised my network rendering.

[Da_elf]

i thought xp home was always an issue