I had a weird glitch in my dual 2.5 G5 whereby it wouldn't run more than 2 PCI/AGP cards at a time, so I got another used dual 2.7 G5 and decided to try and turn the old machine into the beginnings of a render farm...
After a lot of rebooting and googling I got Qmaster and Shake more or less working but it seems to have a LOT of quirks/problems. From the posts on this board it looks like no one is really crazy about the combination but here's what's working on my system and what isn't:
machines and software:
dual 2.5 G5, Mac OS 10.8, Shake 4.0, Qmaster 2.0
dual 2.7 G5, Mac OS 10.6, Shake 4.0, Qmaster 2.0, SATA raid, FW drives
1000mps ethernet router
To get Qmaster working:
- had to disable IPv6 on both machines (Network settings); otherwise the systems couldn't connect to each other
- had to configure one machine (the dual 2.5) as a cluster controller/service node, using MANAGED (!) services (Quickclusters never quite worked)
- configured the dual 2.7 as a service node, again MANAGED services
- had to make sure and always save the script before submitting to Qmaster
- had to turn of UNC in both versions of Shake (per the manual)
- source and output volumes need to be networked and mounted on all the machines (per the manual)
- both machines like to have their processor performance set to 'high' (Power Saver settings)
- assembled Quicktimes are always formated with 'Animation' codec, no matter what the file-out node is set to.
Current problem:
- qmaster seems to get corrupted unless I reboot the cluster controller machine after every distributed render. The 'corruption' manifests itself by some kind of filename bug--the controller machine was creating single frame IFF files which were named after an earlier task, so when qmaster went to assemble a Quicktime from the IFF files, it didn't find the misnamed IFFs. I looked in the temp files created by qmaster and there were no traces of misnamed IFFs in the shake scripts so I can't figure out what was causing this...
Anyway, when qmaster is working it is really fast but this is driving me crazy. Anyone got any ideas?