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View Full Version : Vista/Windows 7 workstation as server

biliousfrog
12-15-2009, 04:11 PM
I've had some problems with my render farm (XP) dropping the connection to my new workstation and controller (Windows 7). It happened quite randomly, has been working fine for a few weeks, but would like to share my findings in case it is useful for others looking to change from XP to Vista or Windows 7.

My symptoms were that the shared network folders on my workstation would suddenly become unnaccessable after a few hours of rendering despite being able to ping it successfully. Restarting the nodes had no effect but restarting the workstation (controller) enabled the nodes to reconnect again.

After lots of swearing and searching I discovered a listing in the event viewer of the workstation for Event ID 2017 - The server was unable to allocate from the system nonpaged pool because the server reached the configured limit for nonpaged pool allocations.

I discovered some articles pertaining to this problem and it seems that Vista and Windows 7 needs to be set up to work as a server from within the registry.

Here is an article explaining what keys to alter if anyone else experiences this problem: http://forums.techarena.in/windows-vista-network/1135793.htm
olson
12-15-2009, 04:56 PM
Cool trick, I'll have to read up more on that. While on the subject its worth noting that non-server versions of Windows are limited to ten concurrent connections, and some versions even less than that. If you need to serve files to more than four or five systems its probably worth it to setup a dedicated file server. Any Linux distribution with Samba will do the trick or Gluster Storage Platform (based on Fedora 11). Cheers!
biliousfrog
12-15-2009, 05:14 PM
Cool trick, I'll have to read up more on that. While on the subject its worth noting that non-server versions of Windows are limited to ten concurrent connections, and some versions even less than that. If you need to serve files to more than four or five systems its probably worth it to setup a dedicated file server. Any Linux distribution with Samba will do the trick or Gluster Storage Platform (based on Fedora 11). Cheers!

Yeah I've heard about that. I doubt that I'll get that large, I'd rather have a few fast machines and upgrade more regularly as I only do moderate animation work...although it's always something worth bearing in mind.
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