DISCLAIMER: This is a continuing series detailing the painful story of a DIY render farm build. It is terribly technics and
somewhat frustrating. Those who are unprepared for such “entertainment” are advised to ignore these posts.
I did go back to drqman and try it again. But, drqman still asked to reference an out of date lib – once again the dylib I jammed in there was version 1601, but drqman wanted version 12.
Start again! I threw it all away – and this time I mean all of it, and starting by updating all ports. I was obviously missing something, and there were too many versions of things. The whole thing was confusing and it was time to re-read my notes, start at the beginning, only do what was successful before, and see what I could get.
In the meantime, and while the slow parts were happening on Cyclops (the Mac Mini PPC), I began wondering if I could put the 10.9 operating system or even 10.8 on the worker machines. Why would I think that, you say? I was doing some reading, mostly to see what the latest versions of software I could use would be. I was somewhat disappointed, as I mentioned before, that if the workers were running OSX 10.7 then they could not run the latest version of anything, requiring some awkward workarounds to get the farm to be any use.
It appeared, however, that some folks had had some luck installing later operating systems on machines that supposedly could not handle them. I was not too worried about my older machines being too slow to run 10.9. After all, they were in a farm, so a slow-down in processing power would be offset by the array configuration and the fact that the farm works at all. The benefit would be to install rendering software that is current so I could make better use of the power I did have. Since the renderers are all going to be command-line versions without GUIs themselves, I only need raw computing power out of the worker machines.
Since the Port selfupdate was taking some serious time I had plenty of time to read up and think about this…