Good afternoon,
First of all, thank you very much for the initiative.
Here's my situation: I'm located in Barcelona and have two computers (one mac and one PC) that are connected to another network in Paris with 7 more macs. We're connected through a Synology Diskstation (https://www.synology.com/es-es/products/DS218play) and we want to build our render farm using our Synology server as the hub for all the projects and rendered files. Is that possible? What's the best approach for my case? I tried to make a render test with another computer here, and apparently has synced properly, but the render keeps on, even when I disconnect or unplug the slave computer. How to make sure that the render is being processed in conjunction with all machines, instead of just rendering in one machine? the interface doesn't give us much information about that.
I'm new on that stuff, and I hope you can give me an initial direction
Thank you very much
Hi Diego, sorry for taking so long to spot this, our forum provider stopped sending us updates :(, so I have to go back through all the posts and find the ones that I have not seen.
It might be best if you can draw a map of the networks, including how the connect to the internet, where the server is that will hold the assets to render. This is going to help us understand your network topology and how you could get a good setup.
Dropbox is certainly one way of doing it, but could be expensive, and DB can have some very bad behaviour with your bandwidth sometimes. But, I have used it before and it's worked, so its an option for sure, I just wouldn't recommend connecting all your render nodes at one location to dropbox, thats all. I have tried it with just one computer at each location, that worked, but DB consumed a lot of the bandwidth I had. It might be different for you, but you should test before you commit to using this.
Also, don't know if you are aware, but we are building a new system ,and we're raising funds to support it. If you or your company are interested in having us support your render farm, there are tiers with direct video support, and as a bare minimum, I'd recommend the $10 tier as you'll be able to join our slack group and then you can send us files, chat in real time, it saves a lot of back and forth and also saves us missing your messages here in the forum. We will fix the forum, but its not a high priority because we're changing our web provider. Seems that we can't get decent service from our current one and they have broken tools, like this forum, which they have not really made a great effort to fix.
Saludos cordiales!
James