Hello all,

I have a puzzling problem with 2010 Design: All the render farm servers that I have installed 2010 Design, and a few workstations, are now reporting absent to the Render Farm Manager.

This is a well established farm that supports Ver. 9, 2008, 2009 and now 2010; both Vray and Mental Ray as well as RPC. All the servers and manager are running Backburner 2008.1. The servers run Backburner as a service using an Administrator Domain Account. The Manager too runs as a service using the same credentials and does not run the render server service. I have never had any problems with the services running in the background and they always report even after a reboot (no log-on required). All the servers are running Windows Server 2003 Standard x64 Edition SP1. The workstations are XP Professional x64 Edition Version 2003 SP2.

I did not see a need to update the Manager since it is already running Backburner 2008.1 I installed 2010 Design on a few User Workstations and a few of my render servers (blades) to test out the new version and see what new problems would arise. Well one did. Argg!

Note, When installing I allowed the installer to re-install Backburner 2008.1

Here is the problem:
If I fire off the Backburner Server.exe (manual service) on the test systems it runs great, servers render, and reports to the Manager as expected. But, as soon as I setup the render service to run in the background as before the system(s) report absent to the Manager.

What gives?

Does the Manager also need Backburner to be updated from the DVD? if yes, why? it’s already up to 2008.1.

Roy.

I installed both manager and servers from scratch in 2010 design, although I had my doubts if this was really neccessary.

The same problem: when the server is running as a service, it is listed as absent, the manager can’t use it.

Hope an expert will take a look at this problem.

/Thomas

When I installed Max 2010 and BB on my farm I had to re-install the service on the servers and manager. I don’t remember having to do this in previous versions. It also cleared the render queue.
Have you checked if the service is running? It wasn’t for me untill I went in and did the serversvc -i thing again and set up the login account.

I did not install Backburner on the Manager from the 2010 DVD since that version is already installed.  Since the last release prior to Max 2010 was 2008.1 I did not see the need to update it. Even the Installer from the DVD said the same version was already installed, so I cancelled the install on the manager. I also know the server service is running properly with the proper credentials. I have been running this farm for nearly 10 years this way and this is the first time this problem has come up.

This farm is extremly busy with users from around the world so I can’t risk it going down for even 1/2 day. I think I will test installing the manager on a test blade from the DVD to see if that makes a difference, but I suspect not since it’s the same version.

Roy.

I have more information on some test I ran:

I installed Backburner 2008.1.1 on a test server running 2003 Server 32-bit sp1 and started the Manager manually. I pointed one of the other test servers running BB 2008.1.1 to it and I get the same problem, it reports absent as a service.

So I setup on the same test mamager server the render service as a service and it will report to itself with no problems, it just wont except any other servers.

Strange is the word.

Roy.

I’m getting some freaky behaviour from Backburner now. I havn’t used it much since installing Max 2010, because I’m working on a compositing job, mainly in Fusion.
The job does require a but of CGI though, which I’m doing in Max 2010 x64. The CGI stuff doesn’t move, so I only need render a single still frame for each scene. I would normaly use DBR to speed up stills rendering, but my render nodes are still on 32bit XP, havn’t been able to upgrade them to XP x64 yet.
http://area.autodesk.com/for...4-bit-os-on-render-nodes/
This means I can’t DBR from my 64bit workstation.
So, getting to the point now. What I thought I would try was doing a DBR render on one of the nodes via Backburner. There are two nodes on which I have edited the Rayhost files to include the other nodes. These are in a BB Global Group called DBR Masters. So if I submit a job to BB with DBR enabled to the DBR Masters group, the masters two render it using the other nodes as slaves.
I’ll mention now that this method worked previously, although it’s not how I usually work.
So I submit a job, a single frame, to DBR Masters with DBR enabled.
When I look at Monitor, the task has been assigned to #7 node, but #7 is displaying as Absent, the rest are Idle. So then I remove #7 from the job so the other master, #4, can have a go at it. The task is reassigned to #4, then #4 goes from yellow to grey and shows as Absent, #7 goes from Absent to Idle.
If I look at the #4 node, Task Manager shows no activity. Computer Management shows the service running. I restart the service and I get a message saying the service has started and stopped, as if it’s stopped it’s self.
Going back to the Monitor, the job has turned red, but no error message is displayed.

I am getting the exact same issue.
A farm that has worked perfectly fine for years now suddenly shows any bb nodes that have 3ds Max 2010 / Design 2010 installed and running backburner 2008.1.1 as Absent.  I double checked bbserver service permissions and ensured they were running.  Nothing… its like they just don’t see each other.
I did also update backburner manager to 2008.1.1 with no change, all 2008.1.1 servers are absent.

Anyone figure this out yet?

Mine’s working OK now. But I didn’t change anything, only the machines have been rebooted a couple of times.
That job did complete in the end, and subsequent ones have worked.

We had this issue as well.  It turns out that the service creates its own backburner.xml file in:

XP - C:\Documents and Settings\<service log on user>\Local Settings\Application Data\backburner
Vista - C:\Users\<service log on user>\AppData\Local\backburner

So, if you configure the backburner server gui as the logged in user, and set the service logon as user to a different user it will create a new backburner.xml with the default settings.  In our case the default auto-discover configuration won’t work.  Once I made the proper changes to the backburner.xml file in the service user’s profile path it connected to the manger as expected.

Thank You Tofu4679!!!!

That was it !

I copied the XML from the standard network folder that is for the manual server exe to the service log-on folder as you prescribed and it’s finally reporting. Now I can upgrade the entire farm!!!!

This is a serious design flaw for Backburner 2008.1.1.

Backburner 2008.1.0 does not use the XML from the service user directory, it relies on the XML from the BB network folder.

I should have caught this. RPC has the same kind of issue with RPC.ani files installing everywhere.

Thanks again!

I am also having a problem getting the backburner service to register with the manager. I tried following the instructions above, but there wasn’t a pre-existing backburner.xml anywhere in my Documents and Settings directory. Server.exe runs just fine.

Any advice would be appreciated.

WinXP x64 SP2
2.4Ghz Q6600, 8GB RAM
3ds Max Design 2011 x64, Release 13.0
NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700, ForceWare 169.47