Author Topic: Locking machines  (Read 2907 times)

martyfitz

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Locking machines
« on: May 24, 2011, 04:03:28 PM »
We've got Qube 5.5 running in the labs at school and it has mostly worked fine.  We're  using the log-in and log-out scripts so that the machines are locked when someone logs in, and unlocked when they log out.

While this mostly worked, it didn't always.  Folks would be trying to work and the machine would be tanking because there was a render going in the background.  Everyone quickly figured out that if they killed the worker.exe and mayabatch.exe that the render in the background stopped.  While this worked for them, it took the machine completely off the render farm when they logged off.  We ended up with a significant amount of CPUs that were listed as down.

The only thing I could think of is that the worker is waiting until the current frame is rendered before stopping the process on a machine.  So if a 2 hour frame is rendering when someone logged in, it would still be running in the background for a couple of hours.  Does this sound correct?

Is there a way to configure the workers to stop jobs immediately when they are locked?  Or a command to immediately stop a job while leaving the worker.exe running?

Thanks for any help!

Marty

jburk

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Re: Locking machines
« Reply #1 on: May 27, 2011, 07:45:10 PM »
Are your login scripts calling qblock with the "-purge" option?  This should kick the job off the worker immediately, provided the user calling the script has the qube "lock" privilege.

qblock -purge <hostname>

martyfitz

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Re: Locking machines
« Reply #2 on: May 27, 2011, 08:43:19 PM »
Definitely not using the -purge switch at the moment.  I'll add that.

It looks like the [default] user does have lock permission, if I'm understanding ---l correctly in that qbusers --list output.

Thanks for the help. 

Marty