I am working on a network render farm for the Architecture school that I am attending.  I have set it up with 4 bb servers and a seperate bb manager monitor. I have also loaded server.exe file on the manager computer.  In the monitor and manager I can get all four servers to connect, however when I try to send a job it will only connect to the manger computers server if it is loaded.  How do I get the rest of the servers to be shown in the project assignment with to be assigned?

Did you submit the job to include all available servers?

3ds Max 9 thru 2013
Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit OS SP1
Dual Intel® Xeon® 6 core X5650 @ 2.67GHz CPU 36GB RAM
NVIDIA Quadro 4000
450GB HDD (x3) and 2TB HDD

3ds Max 2012 Certified Professional Models to Motion

Is it a single file job? As in a single still image or a video file.
BB will only alow one server to create one file.
So for a still image you must use Split Scanline. For an animation you must render to an image sequence.

If that is not the case, are the machines cloned installs? If so they may all register with the same handle (mac address) to the manager, making only one available at a time.

I believe that it is selected to use all available servers, but I will check the setting.  The file is a single file that I sent as a split scanline.  I loaded all of the machines individually with seperate Ip’s and names.

Split scanline shoud work for a single still, giving each node a strip to do.

I loaded all of the machines individually with seperate Ip’s and names.

That’s good, you should have fixed IP addresses, but BB identifies nodes by their mac address, refered to by BB as the Handle.
With cloned installs, they can all end up with the same handle saved in one of the BB XML files. I don’t recall which one right now, but this problem has been covered here before.

I loaded backburner on each node with out any cloning being done.  Here are a few screen shots of what I am running into.

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Not a silly question I was told that it was not needed.  If it is needed, can I just install it with out having it activated? I will have to do some updating on the nodes but that is possible.

Perfect I will go install it and try that.

You must intall Max on the render nodes. The render only machines don’t have to be licensed or activated, so don’t worry about that.

But you do need to open Max once as the user you plan on rendering as...just open as a trial.

3ds Max 9 thru 2013
Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit OS SP1
Dual Intel® Xeon® 6 core X5650 @ 2.67GHz CPU 36GB RAM
NVIDIA Quadro 4000
450GB HDD (x3) and 2TB HDD

3ds Max 2012 Certified Professional Models to Motion

Doughboy12 01 February 2012 02:06 AM

But you do need to open Max once as the user you plan on rendering as...just open as a trial.

I get around this by editing the registry to disable user profiles.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Autodesk\backburner\2008.1] “UserLocalData"="0"

CPU: Dual Intel Xeon X5570 @ 2.93GHz
RAM: 12.00 GB
Video Card: Nvidia Quadro FX 4800
OS: Windows 7 Pro x64
Max Version: Design 2012