I’d like to hear what others are using for the server that dishes out the backburner jobs. If you have a dedicated machine for this let me know. I keep all my models and materials on my server too, but if others are doing differently I’d like to hear about that too.
I have a dedicated dual 2.8 Ghz Xeon 
…with 1G of RAM 
I’m pretty sure the 1GB of RAM is what is causing my recent BB problems.
What version of BB are you running? We had quite a few errors using V2007 (or whatever it was called) that is installed with Max9. I just downgraded everything to 3.02 (we only use Max8 anyway) and everything is running flawlessly.
I’ve been running that version 3 that came with max 8 for a long time and I get the “enexpected error and shutting down” error a lot. How much ram do you have on your BB manager machine?
You don’t need much for the backburner manager.
Our manager is running on a Win2k Server that is also doing quite a few other tasks like being the Primary Domain Controller, Nightly Backup Server, key/dongle server and more.
It is only a P3 350Mhz with 512MB of ram, a 17GB hard drive, and a 100Mbit network card. Network rendering barely makes a blip in CPU, Memory, and Network useage.
All our scenefiles, textures, and render output paths are on a network fileserver appliance that as far as I can tell is just a 486 with a specialized operating system.
We’re running 17 slaves on our render farm and a few workstations.