Setting up a Brenda image with Blender 2.78c

I’ve been doing some rendering in the cloud and have been able to run Win-Brenda using the existing recommended AMIs. Now I’m trying to set up my own AMI with the newest version of Blender (2.78c) and I think I’m missing something.

Long story short: when I run an instance of the custom AMI via Win-Brenda, nothing gets rendered. I don’t know how to view what’s going on in my particular AMI because I get nothing from Win-Brenda’s “Tail log from instances” feature. The AMI is shown to be running in the AWS console – I just think I don’t have something set up correctly.

Here are the steps I take to create my AMI:

  • Go to the EC2 console and click on launch instance. On the left you will see AMI options. Quickstart is highlighted by default. Click on Community AMIs. From the checkboxes on the left, choose Ubuntu, 64-bit, and EBS. Enter “Yakkety Yak” for the search term. (“Yakkety Yak” is the code name for Ubuntu 16.10.) Pick an AMI with Virtualization type: HVM (not paravirtual). I picked this image: “ubuntu/images-testing/hvm-ssd/ubuntu-yakkety-daily-amd64-server-20170716 - ami-01212b17”.
  • Choose an Instance Type: I picked “c3.large”.
  • Configure Instance Details: I left all the defaults. FYI – Shutdown Behavior is set to “Stop”.
  • Add Storage: Leave all the defaults (8 GB for the root).
  • Add Tags: I left the default options.
  • Configure Security Groups: For now, I’m going with the defaults: Assign a Security Group: Use an existing security group, andType: SSH, Source: Anywhere
  • Select an existing key pair or create a new key pair: I chose an existing key pair that I know that works.
  • If you created a new key in step 7, generate the proper key here.
  • After you launch the PuTTY command line, you’ll see the command line say “login as:”. Put in “ubuntu” (sans quotes).
  • Now run this:

sudo perl -p -i.bak -e 's/^disable_root: 1/disable_root: 0/' /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg
sudo perl -p -i.bak -e 's/.*ssh-rsa/ssh-rsa/' /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:irie/blender
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install blender
sudo apt-get install -y blender python-pip gcc python-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev git unzip
sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo pip install -U boto
sudo pip install -U s3cmd
sudo apt-get install git
sudo apt-get  update; sudo apt-get install  python-dev -y
sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev

  • Next, download and install Brenda:

git clone http://github.com/jamesyonan/brenda.git
    cd brenda
    sudo python setup.py install

  • At this point, you still don’t have the latest version of Blender. To do that…

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thomas-schiex/blender
    sudo apt update
    sudo apt install blender

  • To check which version of Blender you have installed:

blender -v

I’ve used Linux a bit, but I do not consider myself an expert. Any ideas on things that I can check to make sure that this image runs correctly?

You must change the frame-template file (that contains the actual render command for brenda) so that it points to correct blender folder. And change the brenda conf file so that it points to your Amazon S3 buckets for input and output and sets other necessary stuff. Don’t remember the queue part, maybe the SQS worked by default. Anyway, there is some confing to do besides just installing brenda.

There was a good description of all necessary steps in brendapro.com forum, but unfortunately that page is down. Maybe you can find it in some web archive still.

Easiest way to get things running is to launch an existing brenda AMI, install new blender there, change the templates as necessary and save the instance as new image.

EDIT: just dawned to me that the win-brenda might set the configuration stuff automatically through startup script. But still it is worth checking the frame-template path.

Thanks for the response, kesonmis. Yes, it appears that win-brenda sets up all of the configuration stuff automatically. It would be nice to take an existing public AMI and install a new version of Blender on it, but I tried that some months ago and IIRC it was not possible to do because the AMIs were locked down in such a way where I couldn’t do that. Plus – and I could be wrong about this – it appears that you need to have a compatible Linux version to run certain versions of Blender. In other words, to run 2.78c, I need a relatively recent version of Ubuntu, and the public AMIs are running older versions of Ubuntu that probably cannot run newer versions of Blender without a lot of headaches.

As far as the brendapro.com forum, AFAIK they lost the content of entire site and the caches that I’ve found on Google or archive.org were really shallow (i.e. I couldn’t get to many of the posts). It looks like this post… http://brendapro.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=37 …had all the information I need, but it no longer exists and can’t be found via Google cache or archive.org.

I have an Ubuntu 14 AMI where Blender 2.78a runs without problems, so 2.78c should also work.

That’s good to know. Did you set up this AMI yourself?

Yes, I did a base AMI two years ago with the help of description in brendapro forum. I have every now and then installed new Blender versions into it and made new images. I use it through command line, haven’t used the winbrenda myself. I’m on win so I fire up a linux virtual machine in Virtualbox and do my brenda stuff from there. To upload/download to/from Amazon S3 I use the Cloudberry S3 Explorer software.

I got it working. I found a detailed set of instructions here: https://github.com/robksawyer/brenda-web/wiki/How-to-Create-an-Amazon-Machine-Image-(AMI)