About to set-up Blender render farm (help)

Hey all,

I’m about to set-up a 10~ machine render farm at my university using the Blender internal and the Blender network render plugin.

I’ll be using Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit, with Blender 2.59.

I’ve never set-up a network using Ubuntu before so I’m a little unsure as to how I’ll go about it.

The farm will be quite basic at first, even just having a shared drive to manually set-up renders on each machine will suffice for the moment, if I were to do this would I just need to enable file-sharing on each set-up and have them networked?

I’ll be making use of a hub to connect the machines, and I’d like to have one machine set-up as a master to control all over the others at some point. I’m thinking a remote desktop application would be useful for remotely monitoring the other machines, again though I’m a little unsure about how to go about this.

Basically, where would I start?

I do apologize for asking some very basic questions, but I figure it’s best to get a good starting direction rather than randomly check out every Google search result that’s comes up for “Ubuntu networking”

Are these 10 machines a computer class ones or just for renderfarm?

Just for a renderfarm, so I have full access to the machines.

I have a twelve node farm in a closet in my basement.

  1. Install linux, and update.
  2. Install blender, sudo apt-add-repository ppa:cheleb/blender-svn
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install blender
  3. Run blender, turn on network render addon on.
  4. set as default, ie save preferences.
  5. select network render, set as slave, save file as slave.blend in the folder of your choice.
  6. go to startup apps, these are the apps you want to run when you op system boots. create a new startup app
    title Slave
    program blender -b /home/user/Documents/slave.blend -a
  7. Now this is not nessessary but I have autologon set, and I change power button pressed for ask me, to power off, I never have to hook up a monitor or keyboard.
  8. on my work computer win 7 i created a shortcut application = blender.exe -b “path-to-master.blend” -a and put it in the startup folder so it starts automatically, set to minimized.
  9. When Im working on a project, I use the work blender as client.

Hope that helps!

It is also helpful (for me it was) to work with fixed IP adresses, the automatic connection does not work for me.

Cheers, mib.