I recently got my hands on some old servers that I thought would be perfect for adding to my small renderfarm (despite no longer being cutting-edge, they’re still better than some of the machines I’ve been using).
So I fired up the farm this week to render an animation, and while all the machines I’d already been using produce frames like this (which is what I’m after), the servers I just added all produce this instead.
I thought it might be because I’d installed a different OS version on the servers, so I wiped one of the machines that produced correct frames and installed the same OS I’d put on the servers (using the same install CD), to see if it would start rendering incorrectly as well - but no, it continued to produce correct frames. I verified that it had the same packages installed, and even removed some RAM so that its specs were as close to the servers’ as possible. It still produced correct frames.
What on earth could be causing this? The machines having the issue are Dell PowerEdge 2650 servers, each with two dual-core Xeon processors and 2GB RAM, running Ubuntu Server 12.04.1 LTS.