BackBurner Probleme...

[gilpo]

Are you able to remote desktop into the nodes to watch what they do when they pick up a job? That might give you some more insight into the problem. Also check the vray log file on the computer. It may just be that BB is throwing a generic error for something vray is doing.

We're using a pretty basic gigabit network here with cat5e wiring, so you shouldn't be having problems there.

Oh, and a commonly recommended solution to a lot of backburner woes is to make sure you have the full max package installed on the manager machine. It's stupid, I know, but it often fixes problems. Why? I don't know. I had some problems a while back and I completely uninstalled backburner on the manager and re-installed the whole max package and everything was fine after that. Something to try.

[gilpo]

I just thought of something else. Are these new machines? Have they successfully rendered anything yet? I know that max takes a while to load right after its first installed. This could be causing a time-out if the scene is large and max is having trouble launching anyway. Maybe try sending a simple job out to make sure everything is working right.

[tricky]

They are newish, and so they have rendered quite a bit of stuff. Will give the complete reinstall an idea.

Another thing I have been noticing is that when I remote desktop into the offending machines (which I can do so the network is not completelky buggered!), the mapped netwrk drives (a work drive, an admin drive, a textures drive etc) are marked as being disconnected. Double-clicking on them doesn't re-establish the link which is odd. Now I can't be sure that this happens every time we have one of these BB problems, but certainly over the last couple of days it seems pretty consistent.

This suggests it could be some network issue, but I don't really know what. I can RDP into the machines, so the network hasn't completely died, as I have said, so it just seems to be the link from the machines to the mapped drives on the Win2003 Server machine. This is odd. What could be going on there. I have, this morning, updated the network drivers on these machines - its an Intel PRO/1000 EB NIC (2 of them in each machine, but we only use the one), so I have yet to see if this helps.

We used to have the occasional mapped drives issue many years ago, but since moving to a proper Domain with a 'serious' server, the problems seemed to go away. Even back when we had the problems, double-clicking on the mapped drives seemed to re-establish the link.

Any suggestions?

[gilpo]

Do you use Symantec Endpoint Security (anti virus) by any chance? There were some nasty bugs in the original release that would cause network drives to lose their mapping and need a reboot to fix it.

We've been on a domain since day one but we had one machine that would lose its mappings for some unknown reason. We eventually replaced the onboard NIC with a PCI NIC and the problem went away. So, it could be a driver issue. It could also be a NIC configuration issue. Bad cable? Remote desktop is pretty tolerant of a bad connection as it will often allow a connection to die and reconnect without you even knowing it. However, BB may not be so tolerant.

I'm not a network specialist by any means but heres a list of things to look into for possible problems/solutions based on problems we've run into here:

Disabling connection AutoSense (the thing that knows when a cable is plugged in or unplugged)

Manually specifying a connection speed instead of Auto Negotiate

Disabling SMB signing of packets (we found that disabling it greatly decreased latency and solved other problems we were having)

Make sure that if you system goes into 'Offline Mode', that it automatically goes back 'Online'. I seem to remember these being in the domain or computer policy settings on the server.

Check firewall settings or temporarily disable the firewall on the offending nodes to see if the problem goes away.

Hope this helps.

[WimOos]

We had the same issue a while ago - just scanned through so it may have been mentioned :
make sure that you have the same version of backburner installed on all machines. Max2009 does not install backburner if one is allready installed - so we ended up with machines with different versions of backbuner. We sorted this out and all our problems went away.