Windows workstations & Linux renderfarm

[Phantom-Studio]

Hi Petrov,

And thanks for your last feedback.
After following your steps we are still not able to do DR rendering with Amazon EC2 for the moment because the port 20207 (according to nmap) is filtered.
We can ping on the Public IP but vraydr_check tool give nothing too.
But nevermind, we will try to find a solution directly with the Amazon support team about that port filtering and we will let you know!

So now I'm coming back because we have another problem (and it seems in relation with the previous one) :

---

Just to remember :

We are 2 people in 2 differents cities

Location n°1 :
- 1 x workstation (Windows 7 Pro x64)
- 5 x rendernodes with VRay Standalone (Fedora 22 Workstation x64)
- 1 x Qnap NAS TS-670-Pro with all the datas

Location n°2 :
- 1 x workstation (Windows 7 Pro x64)
- 2 x rendernodes with VRay Standalone (Fedora 22 Workstation x64)
- 1 x Qnap NAS TVS-671 with all the same datas as location n°1

And the 2 Qnap NAS on the 2 locations are live synced in 2-ways throught Internet
All machine have the same install of Vray 3.00.01 for Maya

About local DR jobs between Windows Workstation and Fedora Rendernodes : your workaround that you have previously suggested to us works perfectly, so thank you for that!

---

Now we try to launch DR jobs from location n°1 throught our VPN.
Workstation and Rendernodes on location n°2 are connected with PPTP on location n°1 like this step by step guide : https://www.my-private-network.co.uk...-15-pptp-setup .

On location n°2 :
- Windows Workstation works perfectly
- Fedora Rendernodes do nothing (connection timeout)

So on Fedora we check with nmap and the port 20207 is open.
That's why I'm thinking that we encounter the same problem (connection timeout) as DR jobs with Amazon EC2.

If you have any idea, it would be great!
Thanks again.

Regards.
Jonathan

[vlado]

Have you tried disabling any firewalls (selinux and/or Windows Firewall)?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Phantom-Studio]

Hi Vlado,

Yep sure, Windows firewall and SElinux deactivated!
The strange thing is that :

- on local : DR jobs works fine between Windows and Fedora machines
- on VPN : DR jobs works fine between distant Windows machines but connection timeout between distant Fedora machine

Hope this helps!
Regards.

Jonathan

[vlado]

Ok, thanks for the details but I'm not sure what we can do to help you. It is not technically a V-Ray issue as such, but some kind of network problem. We could try to replicate your set up, but it will take time.

Do you get any error messages when the main DR machine fails to connect to the render servers? What are the error codes?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Phantom-Studio]

Thanks for the feedback Vlado,

I think you are right ; after lots of research it seems to be a routing problem in fedora...
I need to make a "route add 192.168.X.X -net blablabla", but for the moment I don't get it...

So I will post a message on Fedora's forum and I hope they can help me!
After that, if we find a solution I will come back in order to let you know.

Have a nice day.
Regards.

Jonathan

[Phantom-Studio]

Hi all,

I just get back to this old post as we are facing another issue with Xgen :

1) Distributed rendering on mixed OSes renderfarm (Win & Fedora), how to get Xgen working with environment variables?

Seems the environment variables path to Xgen Archives, etc, ... are not working on Fedora.

Thanks for your help.
Regards.

Jonathan

[moshev]

XGen shouldn't interact with distributed rendering at all, only during scene translation (Maya scene->V-Ray scene), i.e. on the local machine.

Is it possible that the render slaves aren't picking up the environment variables? How do you set them?

If you export to vrscene from Maya and then render with standalone (passing the -distributed=1 option), does it work?

[Phantom-Studio]

Hi moshev,

On linux machine, environment variables are directly set in the script that launch vrayslave.
Here is the script :

export WORK_PATH=/mnt/WORK
export LIBRARIES_PATH=/mnt/LIBRARIES
export ARCHIVES_PATH=/mnt/ARCHIVES

/usr/ChaosGroup/V-Ray/Maya2016-x64/bin/vrayslave

It's only to change "Z:" to "/mnt/" with the use of ${WORK_PATH}

I think XGen is using path relative to Maya's Project Path... and no way to set absolute path in Xgen...
What do you think?

Regards.

Jonathan