Spawner restarting over and over

[tricky]

Good grief, will DR/BB problems ever go away.

We are running Max2013 with BB2008 and Vray2.4.

We've been making a few changes to our network, which mainly involved renaming machines and changing IPs. Only thing that I think has been installed is BB2008 (after first removing BB2013) as we have had historic issues with newer versions of BB.

We now can't seem to do any distributed rendering. Spawner is running as a service but just keeps launching 3dsmax.exe and building up the ram to around 400MB then restarting. Trying to run spawner manually has the same problem - continuous launching of the dummy file.

I have tried copying vraydummy from my local machine - no luck.
I have disabled firewall - no luck.
I have reinstalled vray - no luck.

What am I missing?

Machines are W7x64.

[tricky]

OK, I think I solved this, and for future reference (for me as much as anyone else) here is what happened.

1) I tried to render an animation using BB. It didn't work. I recalled that with past animations, we only ever had success with BB2008 and we had BB2013 installed.

2) I uninstalled BB2013 from all machines and installed BB2008.

3) I still couldn't seem to render an animation, so I put that problem on hold and tried to do a DR render. It failed.

4) Noticed one of my slaves was continuously restarting spawner.

5) Vaguely recalled that sending a BB render to each machine was required to get DR working - WHY IS THIS????!!!!!!

6) Couldn't get BB rendering working with BB2008.

7) Desperate, I reinstalled BB2013. BB render now worked.

After this, DR worked.

What a fun day I've had.

[svetlozar.draganov]

Very funny situation with happy ending

[3LP]

Hey there,

We just updated to SP4 today and I have 2 nodes out of the 50 restarting max in loop.

I tried to uninstall BB and re-install, it didn't fixed it...

Do you guys have any other ideas?

Thanks

Stan

[svetlozar.draganov]

Have you run a BB job after the re-installation ?

[3LP]

No, I just need to spawn, so I start the VraySpawner.
This one start max usually, and for those 2 nodes, max start in a loop...

So no, no BB job, only spawners

Thanks

Stan

[tricky]

No, I just need to spawn, so I start the VraySpawner.
This one start max usually, and for those 2 nodes, max start in a loop...

So no, no BB job, only spawners

Thanks

Stan

Send a simple backburner job to each of the problem nodes - just a teapot or something. Once that has completed, it should/might/will/will not (delete where appropriate) kick spawner into touch.

I honestly think we need a more robust solution for DR. Is there anything that can be improved by the ChaosGroup team?

[3LP]

No didn't fixed it :/

Stan

edit : I did update "Vray/forest pack/railclone/vizpark/laubwerks/motiva exposure control" today, all at once, could it be one of those that crash ax and not only vray?

[tricky]

Doesn't look like the same error we get, but I have had so many over the years I am losing track.

Have you disabled the firewall completely on those 2 problem machines?

Also, I'm not sure if it did anything with ours, but in addition to disabling the firewall, I put in Incoming/Outgoing exceptions for TCP/UDP ports 30304 and rebooted. Perhaps try that.

[svetlozar.draganov]

I did update "Vray/forest pack/railclone/vizpark/laubwerks/motiva exposure control" today, all at once, could it be one of those that crash ax and not only vray?

I don't think so - Vray Spawner opens just an empty 3DSMax scene.
Would it be possible to log in on those two machines and try to open and render a few scenes locally ?

[3LP]

Yep,

I just tried and max closes before opening completely...

Sorry if I miss understood what you said, but :
Where you offering to have a look yourself? Would a teamviewer session go for you?

Stan

[3LP]

Ok I found out what it was.
It seems it was 2 differents things on the nodes.
One still has the plugins locally (I hate managing Win8 through Refamo, does anyone knows how to disable any protection that win 8 create)
The other thing was that some of the legacy settings where still in max (ie calling for the max2011 maxstart) so I deleted the enu folder in the appdata user account and it recreated that folder and all the files within and it fixed the issue.
Both a rendering fine now, thanks for your time guys

Stan