I am experiencing a lot of trouble relative to drive mapping. At my firm we work entirely off the network and have several different drive mappings for our network resources. The trouble is really with the difference between UNC paths and mapped drive paths (e.g. //Server/mount/folder -vs- H:/folder). The way we use our network is through the drive letter mapping method; so all the bitmaps and file resources in our files are mapped in that way. When submitting a netrender job, backburner is unable to find any of those drive mappings, so it throws errors and refuses to even start the job. I have mapped a number of folders into the user configured paths in Max. Anything mapped there works fine. However, anytime you use a texture map or you choose to save a file to a drive letter path that isn’t mapped through the User Paths you get these backburner errors. When I use the same files but change the mappings to the UNC format the job runs without any problems. Unfortunately this isn’t a practical solution to the problem. I need to find some way to make the backburner server service on the rendernodes aware of the drive letter mappings. In addition I have to work around not having any access to these machines (including Remote Desktop) without having to involve our IT dept. They are unwilling to give us remote access to the machines because they are physically located in the server room (not able to argue this one despite it making no real sense).

So here is my question. How can I set up backburner to recognize drive letter mappings for our network drives with the server installed as a service. I cannot add these mappings as part of the user configured paths in Max (although this does work) because I don’t have access to the rendernodes and we add new folders on a daily basis which would not exist in the mappings and hence not work with network renders.

Details
We have two rendernodes set up to with Backburner 2008.1.0.270. They are running the Max2009 64-bit plugin. The server is installed as a service which has a network login defined. The login has administrative rights on our network and should have no permissions issues. As part of our login process a script runs automatically for all users which maps network resources like drives or printers. I am unsure if this script runs for a service when it logs into the domain the same as it does for a user logging in. Previously we have used drive letter mappings with our rendernodes with the older version of Backburner and Max 8 with no problems using this same setup and login.

As long as the path / drive letter was stored in the file with the resources, then the network rendering should work with paths / drive letters.  If you change the driver letter assignment, that’s when you run into trouble.

It looks a lot like you really should be using Project Folders, and to make all User Paths Relative so that project folders can help in finding the new resources.  It will be best if you mapped a drive, then placed all your new project folders within that mapped drive, so as people used new folders, those should work out fine from the mapped drive.

Maneswar Cheemalapati [FA]

Although I have not been able to find an actual solution to the problem I have found a work around that I think will satisfy the “dumb and simple” test. Since the target audience at my firm are mostly people who have next to no knowledge of Max the dumb and simple part is important.

Rather than using a UNC path while linking network resources you can go about adding bitmaps, etc. to your file right off of mapped drives. Navigate to File > Asset Tracking (you can also hit shift+T). Using this tool you can select your maps and files and using Paths > Resolve Paths to UNC Locations Max will automatically fix your paths to conform to UNC. I typically do this before sending a net render. I haven’t experimented with it much yet so I’m not sure if you need to do it anytime you change a path or add a new path.

I’m still looking for exactly the root of the issue here so if anyone else has this problem please commiserate!

I’ve been working on exactly the same issue.  When server is run as a service the script that maps drives is not run.  Therefore server will be unable to resolve any resource paths using mapped drives.  Like you we also had no problems with server as a service using mapped drives prior to bb 2008.  Looking back it should not have worked so how it did is a mystery to me.

Does your firm have a intranet?  Currently we are considering using this path to access resources in lieu of UNC.  The advantage is if your IT department needs to move around any of your resources the UNC paths will change, but not the paths via your intranet.