Installation & Licensing

[#1]

Hello folks,

I'm setting up a shared Backburner render farm for our Maya students at my school. For ease of support and backup our IT department has asked that I set up the manager and web monitor components on a virtualized Linux machine. The render nodes are three dedicated Macs and several OSX lab stations whose availablilty will be contolled by a render admin.

Maya 2012 SP2 and the latest backburner components (2012.1.1_1575) installed on the render nodes and the equivalent Backburner components on the linux manager vm - which has CentOS 6.2 as the OS.

The linux Backburner Manager and Web Monitor have been configured on the manager VM and the web service is running. I can log in to the web monitor with an admin account but I don't see the Manager listed anywhere. I confess I had no luck troubleshooting using the output from the backburner.log:

2012/03/26 11:00:04 ERR Error accepting connection: Bad file descriptor (9).
2012/03/26 11:00:05 INF Starting Network Manager
2012/03/26 11:00:05 INF <AdapterInfo>
2012/03/26 11:00:05 INF     <Name>Command Line Tool</Name>
2012/03/26 11:00:05 INF     <Version>400</Version>
2012/03/26 11:00:05 INF     <Description>Command Job Adapter v2012.1.1 with user rights</Description>
2012/03/26 11:00:05 INF </AdapterInfo>
2012/03/26 11:00:05 INF <AdapterInfo>
2012/03/26 11:00:05 INF     <Name>Command Line Tool</Name>
2012/03/26 11:00:05 INF     <Version>300</Version>
2012/03/26 11:00:05 INF     <Description>Command Job Adapter v2012.1.1</Description>
2012/03/26 11:00:05 INF </AdapterInfo>
2012/03/26 11:00:05 INF Loading plugin: Command Job Adapter v2012.1.1 with user rights from Backburner Adapter Plugin
2012/03/26 11:00:05 INF Loading plugin: Command Job Adapter v2012.1.1 from Backburner Adapter Plugin
2012/03/26 11:00:05 ERR Unable to connect to 10.10.100.49: Connection refused (111).
2012/03/26 11:00:06 INF New client 10.10.100.49 added to client list
2012/03/26 11:00:06 INF Wiretap interface connected to the local manager
2012/03/26 11:21:39 INF New client 10.10.254.171 added to client list

I'm not quite sure where to head next. Any advice would certainly be appreciated.

Many thanks.

[#2]

Hello - I just set up the Backburner Manager and Web monitor on a Linux distro more or less the same as yours (Scientific Linux 6.2) and am experiencing the same problem. I can access the Web monitor from any machine on the network, but there is no manager listed to monitor. Did you end up resolving your problem? If so I would be interested in hearing from you. As best I can tell the Web Monitor does not require any additional configuration. I can start Server on the workstations and point it at the Manager...and those connect just fine. I just can't monitor the Manager from the Web interface (which was the whole point of this exercise).

[#3]

In fact I did resolve this issue. A very helpful support chap at Autodesk pointed me in the right direction. It turns out RHEL and CentOS distributions make use of a feature called SELinux - Security Enhanced Linux that evidently works in tandem with the firewall settings established through iptables. I'm new to RHEL so this was news to me. Here's a good overview of how SELinux works.

By default SELinux locks down traffic over http. For our purposes it was overkill so I just turned it off by editing the /etc/selinux/config file as follows:

vi /etc/selinux/config

changed the line

SELINUX=enforcing

to

SELINUX=disabled

I saved the file and restarted the server, but to test it you could just switch SELinux off for the current session with:

  echo 0 >/selinux/enforce

then restart Apache and the Backburner service.

Finally, I set a rule to open port 80 through the server firewall and the Backburner manager showed up in the Web Monitor right away.

I hope this helps. Again, thanks to Nelson Cruz at Autodesk tech support for patiently working it out.

[#4]

I actually came to that same solution after looking at some logs and dwelling on the topic for a few minutes. So now I have Web Monitor working!