Any network folks here?

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I am trying to set up a rendering cluster. I want to speed things up but I do like learning as well. So much computing power around here I thought it would be neat to do.

I can’t get it to connect.

I have UDP or TCP options, all my machines run windows. The software seems to be fine and I can see other instances running but they will not connect. I suspect it is some sort of router issue. I am on the same network and I tried setting up port forwarding in the router software but either I am doing it wrong (many attempts with different settings) or that is not the right thing to do.

Any ideas?

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Try shutting off the windows firewall on each of the machines in the cluster. Local network traffic is uneffected by port fowarding on your router.

PS. Make sure you remove those port forwards. They may leave your internal network exposed.

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Windows firewall loves to get in the way of stuff. Microsoft seems convinced that people leave their Windows machines on the Internet or connected to insecure public wifi at all times, and sometimes the only thing for it is to turn off the firewall when you’re doing stuff.

This! Speaking of leaving your computer exposed, that firewall will almost certainly keep you from doing anything other than email and browsing on the Internet that you actually want to do, but it won’t stop any anonymous hacker from doing whatever THEY want with your machine.

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Don’t need the router doing any forwarding, all the machines are inside the network. I agree with Dan, try turning off windows firewall.

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Yeah. Then install linux and turn off that firewall too. :slight_smile:

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Thanks, Now I feel better, I wasn’t just getting those settings wrong. I will try it asap.

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You guys are awesome!!! It worked nice and simple. Well I tried installing linux and nothing happened, I guess next time I will try plugging in the USB install disk next time. Guess I am stuck with windows for now.

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did you try sudo install linux? Or right click, ‘run as administrator’?

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If you know what ports the services are using you can add them to the windows firewall exceptions.

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Sweet, I did a 10+ hour render. I am going to try to cluster up a couple computers and do another and see how it goes.

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Probably 9 hours at the most now.

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Kind of learned a lot with this one. My PC build 2+ years old rock solid the whole time, stress tested with prime95 and lots of cinebench runs. Turns out rendering hammers it even harder. I almost bought a new CPU cooler, then realized some game boost thing built into the ryzen 7 software overclocks it a little too far. Good for games with a bursts of power needed but hours on end of CPU and GPU abuse it overheats the chip. The regular precision boost kept the temps in check. Still makes me want a new cooler knowing it will go faster if it runs cooler. Maybe that will push me to make more machines so I can do more renders.

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I also learned I need to do a full crappy resolution test render before committing all that time to a full render as my rotation is off from where I thought it was.

Fun stuff. I have not done this sort of thing much, but I worked with some guys that did a pretty big render and it was cool to see. I want to mess around more. I will need to commit to buying a software package if I do though.

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Well, you have a long backlog of machines that need pretty renders. I am still waiting for my pre-525 version.

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mp4 files says it was created at 3:30 am (yikes!). This went for way longer than I thought. Maybe I need to turn down the setting a bit. This is not really worth 12+ hours.

https://youtu.be/ymzmKjioiw0

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Render farms are fun.

I ran a 4 node mosix cluster for a while shortly after college. All dual proc 1u servers with 4gb of RAM. I was doing povray videos which I wrote a custom C program to split the povray video into chunks to send out to the farm.

I also played some with bryce3d, 3d studio max, and blender.

Next thing you know you’ll be buying refurbished servers off of Amazon and filling up racks with rendering equipment. Nothing like spending $80/month on electricity to lower a render length by 2 hours :slight_smile:

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Yeah I was looking at that. Adding a second quadro would cut my time by more than adding 3-4 old computers over a wifi network

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That and the render package I used to use went from a couple hundred to $2k… Sometimes software really bums me out.

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I like it! The texture on the conduit (hopefully not stainless there) look very realistic.

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What are you creating the models in? What is your render engine?
I have done some renders in Blender on my crappy i5 windows 10 pc that didn’t take that long.