backburner service and network drives

#1

I am attempting to setup a combustion backburner 3.x renderfarm on a windows domain.

I set it up such that it is logging in as an administrative account. It can access all of the network fine. I can have workspaces which have UNC (\server\folder) footage and UNC outputs, however network drives fail.

I have all of the drives mapped. If I run net use they show up G:\ \server\folder and if I run the server.exe it works perfectly. It’s only a problem with serversvc.exe

On another computer we have a piece of backup software which runs as a service and it sees all of our network drives fine, so I feel like this is a backburner issue.

Any work arounds? Even an internal hardcoded “replace ‘G:’ with ‘\server\folder’” would be fine.

If bad comes to worse I’ll just write a batch script to parse the workspace and rewrite all of the links to UNC automatically… speaking of which, if there is a way like in max for combustion to do that I would much appreciate.

#2

The backburner service usually needs a specific user account that has the appropriate permissions and security settings, I would give that a try first. Then, my guess is to assign an alternate folder you may have to submit from the command line, if that is even an option. Easiest way would be a find and replace tool like that which is built into PSPad which will do the commands on specific files in specific locations. There are also freeware find and replace tools, that do similar things.

-Eric

#3

I set the service to use the full administrative account. It’s able to access the network shares fine, so I’m assuming that the domain privileges are being given to it properly. It’s more like it just doesn’t understand where G:\ is. As if no network drives are being mapped to the service.

#4

Im my experience, Backburner can have problems when UNC mapped drive locations have been specified.

just because the rendernodes running server.exe (and/or manager.exe) can mount the network shares through Windows, doesn’t mean that Backburner can.

WHen you submit your job, make sure you navigate to the target drives using my network places->entire network->microsoft windws network->workgroup->machine->share->folder

Also use the same methodology to specify the permanent network shares on manager.exe and each server.exe machine…

Try it, maybe this will help…

Adam
BOXX Labs

#5

one other thing…

You might try uninstalling server.exe as a service and just run it as an executable.

When server.exe runs as a service, you can’t see what’s happening as far as job status, or error messages.

When server.exe is running as an executable, its much easier to debug any problems becuase you can see any error messages as they are being generated in the server.exe utility window.

If you need server.exe to start every time the machine gets re-booted, just include the shortcut to server.exe in the windows startup folder…

Cheers,

Adam

#6

Just as an aside point, watch out for Windows XP’s maximum connections limit (from memory I think it’s around 10 connections). If you’re running the Backburner manager on a Windows XP machine then you’ll only be able to have a maximum of 10 concurrent connections to it.

The way to overcome this is to ensure you are running Windows Server software instead on the machine that operates the Backburner manager.

#7

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#8

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