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.
Back in my office, I installed the first slave, called “Gog,” and started everything up in situ.
- Powered up Gog – everything seems okay.
- Powered up Cyclops – that’s the PDC/Mac mini PPC – I set it to start drqman on login.
- I ran the install.sh script found in the Dr. Queue distribution to set up the drqman master as a launchd daemon. In other words, it should auto-launch on restart.
- X-Quartz needs to auto-launch on the PDC, so I added it to the login items on the PDC.
- Restarted.
- Thus – the master was running, the shared directories “logs” and “tmp” should have been available on the network to all machines.
- What about storage? Where do I put big storage? Because the “tmp” directory was on Cyclops, which has a puny hard drive – maybe 80Gb? Perhaps only 40? It’s an old machine. If the slaves render to that directory it will fill soon. And any portable/removable drive could not be configured for every single job.
- Screen sharing was on for the slave “Gog,” so I could connect to it from the PDC without switching monitor and keyboard cables.
- Success! The PDC restarted, ran the master, and everything was fine.
- The slave.conf file was working, and the slave machine reported it had loaded, but I was not sure the environment variables were set properly. I was not getting any connection. The master could not see the slave.
I had to shut the door and wait for the next day.