EIAS OS X issues,

For no apparent reason all of my 7.0.1 slaves would crash after writing the control data, and messages about not finding the camera would appear.  Their router address had changed.  The slave cameras would no long launch, even clicking on them directly they open and crash before seeing thier window. They had been working for several weeks with out incident. 

After downloading the new 7.0.1 update, which is only universal, I updated everything to universal.  I had downloaded the previous PPC(CFM) 7.0.1 update, as I run a quad PPC.  The universal camera would at least launch on clicking.  Looking better… but..

Now the Cloud shader is crashing camera through renderama.  Also the dicer!.plm is now named dicer.plm and goes unfound.  I’m giving up for tonight.  I’ll try a reinstall tomorrow, create a fresh render cue and run more tests.

Strange days indeed.
Yon

So dicer changed name in 7.0.1 OS X?  Maybe that is why my PC slaves would have error when my project used dicer?

I spend a whole day rendering stills w/ Renderama and only problem I had was Renderama did not sent a slave a frame even it was sitting idle.  Kind of like that slave was ignored.  But the next attempt Renderama found it.  I had about 12-14 slaves running, 2 of them PC others all Intel Mac.  So far so good.

Hi Yon,
I’m also running the CFM version of EIAS on a PPC G5 tower. I upgraded my CFM version of EIAS 7 to a CFM version of 7.0.1 using this link:

http://www.eitechnologygroup.com/downloads/updates/eias/70/EIAS701CFM.sit

Can’t remember where I found the link though.

So far all is well (including Renderama to other PPC Macs). Haven’t tried using Dicer though.

Aziz.

I have to say that 701 UB Renderama/ Renderama Slave are both unreliable for me too. I have some very strange behaviour (though thankfully they remain usable enough to make my deadlines). I have reported the bugs, but as of yet, the problems haven’t been ‘nailed’.

Dicer had it’s name changed because the ‘!’ (and other strange file characters) were causing all sorts of problems for the UB.

Best,
Ian

PS. In case your interested, the issues (all new to 701) I have reported are:
1. Slaves not picking up when a job is sent to Renderama
2. Slaves sending 0k files back to Renderama before they’ve actually finished rendering (they then error of course)
3. Slaves not opening when a .CCN is sent to them
4. Renderama deleting slaves (and crashing) if said slaves go off the network
5. Renderama file transfer is much slower then 7.0.0

I get one of these problems every few jobs…
And, I have no way to reproduce the issues reliably, so a lot of testing is needed.

Hello.

Please duplicate the “dicer.plm” and rename the copy to “dicer!.plm”. Leave the “dicer.rsc” as it is. This way the plugin will be found under both names.

If you are handy with the Terminal.app, you can create a symbolic link ( “ln -s dicer.plm dicer!.plm” ). This will make the file “dicer.plm” available under the alternative name “dicer!.plm” without actually copying the file. This has advantages when you upgrade the dicer plugin (you might forget to copy/rename it and end up with an old version of “dicer.plm” under the name of “dicer!.plm").

New day, no new hope.

I’ve run Disk Warrior, and TechTools, and issues were found, though apparently fixed.  Now the shader issue doesn’t seem to crash the slaves, instead the slaves are not finding the textures.  I collected the files and opened the collection Strangely one of the textures didn’t get collected. I imagine this one has an issue of having ‘image’ in it’s name, and doesn’t seem to show the ‘.img’ ending in the animator OPEN dialogue box.

What I don’t understand at all, is that the local camera runs fine, and did before I reinstalled the universal update.  In fact, local even runs dicer with out the ‘!’.  Here is another strange thing.  Just as all the weirdness began I was saving out an image from Photoshop CS3, and it would not open in animator. I restarted the machine, saved the image again and it worked… until the slaves got hold of them.  If I can find the photoshop plugin again I’ll reinstall it too.

...

I do have the slaves working now, though still failing sometimes.  Once I removed a corrupted image file, not the one mentioned above, things started to work.  Just not yet multi threading.  I’ll try to put together a proper problem report this weekend, and post it for the EITG team. 

Yon

Patrick,
Thanks for the tip, and I had tried what you said earlier, and it works.  Of course then both Dicer and Dicer! show up in the socket menu, and I’m not sure if more issues arise.  It would be nice if animator asked where the missing socket is and you could redirect it to the ! free version.  Some how animator finds it, and not the slaves.

Yon

After reinstalling, and testing, and testing.  Things are working again.  Something was corrupted, and now things are working again.

One thing that was strange was that I could not just drag a new slave folder on top of the old slave folder to replace it.  That way it kept a bit of what ever was wrong, and the slave continued to crash.  I had to delete the bad slave folder all together and replace it.

Rendering has been fine since, even multi-threaded.  One bad file = loss of day.

Thanks for the input.

Yon