Question Regarding DR Computers

[reyloads]

Hello Everyone,
Do you currently have a DR setup? I am starting my own right now. I currently have 2 unused computers that I am going to turn into slaves. Theses computers both have no purpose but to be slave computers. My question is; Do any of you have any advice as far as what to do with the 2 computers as far as their system configurations? Right now they are both freshly formatted and have no personal documents on it or anything like that. I guess I could uninstall everything that I dont need on it.

I am also going to see if I can have is so that the DR program starts up automatically.

Anything that I might be missing?

Thanks a lot guys!

[v-cube]

well ... I would install a 64 bit win 7 on them, if they are worth it performance wise, preferably on a SSD (faster read/write, fast turn on / turn off , low power consumption).
I would control them with the microsoft remote desktop manager.
What I also find quite handy is a way to remotely shut them down or turn them on (wake on lan) ->you have to enable this in the bios settings of your mainboard, once done you can control them with this tool : www.oette.wordpress.com/wol2/
all you need is are the mac addresses an IP numbers of your slaves.
I think that Micha also found a way to turn all slaves on and /or restart the spawner with one single click... you might want to search for that...
Another thing Micha discovered was how to run both the 1.05 and the 1.5 spawner at the same time, probably also worth searching...

hope that helps for a start

Andreas Walther

[Micha_cg]

For automatic startup you could use a tool that let run the spawner as service.
http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbu...ino-5-0-64-bit

remote start of the slaves per pstools
http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbu...remote-install

VfR 1.05 and 1.5 side by side info from the inofficial beta forum
(http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbu...highlight=port)

Hi Micha,

I am going to add entries to our config file so users can change the port that way if they wish. I don't want to automatically change the ports just in case users are already setup with port-forwarding, etc, in their routers/firewalls and don't actually want to use a new port in 1.5 builds.

Here is how it will work: in our root folder we have our ini file( as of 1.5 on windows 7 that would be c:\ProgramData\ASGVIS or on XP c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data ). This change will create a new section for changing the port. It defaults to the current dr port we use- 20211.

"V-Ray for Rhino.ini"

[DRClient]
port=20211

Also, the first time you run our DRSpawner after this patch is introduced, a new ini file will be made in that same folder.

"V-Ray DRSpawner.ini"

[ServerInfo]
port=20211

So if you want to change the port that is used, just change the number in those 2 files and restart Rhino and your DRSpawner so the changes take effect. Keep in mind, you will need to update the port in both ini files - both the client and server need to be talking/listening to the same port.

I would avoid using numbers lower than 20211 because Chaos Group has some reserved ports in that area, so I would go higher than 20211. For my tests, I was using 20215 and it seemed to be ok.

I will add this new feature sometime in the next few days, so it will not be available in public builds until we do another service release. This probably won't be too far into the future, because we have made a number of small fixes to the product, as well as the installation process.

I hope this helps.

Also - just to be clear, this change will only affect the 1.5 builds. Our old 1.05 builds will continue being hard-coded on 20211.

[reyloads]

Thanks a lot guys, I think I am going to start slow with all of this because networking talk is somewhat foreign to me. So far, I made the mistake of using my personal laptop as a DR computer. It was it pretty darn fast and powerful, but the HDD crashed last week. It worked great for about 8 months though.

If you guys could possible answer this question; What is needed for faster rendering speeds? Im thinking that GPU speeds aren't very necessary. It is just CPU and HDD? Thanks a lot!

[Micha_cg]

Only the CPU counts. For the startup and load of many textures the HDD could be a factor. For DR I use a gigabit LAN, it helps should help to load the scene to the slaves.

For example you can use the cinebench CPU scores to compare the power of the different CPU.

[schultzeworks]

I have three computers running as slaves and it's very reliable. The one and only problem I could not overcome was using Wi-Fi connections. Apparently, the slaves need to get the texture maps fast enough or they would not work with the master computer. The Wifi was either too slow or had enough interference that made it unreliable ... so I gave up. All of my slaves are now connected via Ethernet cables and work great.