In recent days I have seen several posts on various social media platforms regarding problems rendering with backburner. I use backburner everyday, and whilst I cannot deny that some users have issues, it has always been rock solid for me. Yesterday I left my office with all my machines happily rendering away overnight. This morning I discovered that only the manager machine was still rendering [for those who don't know you can run manager and server on the same machine].
Looking at the manager log it appeared that the manager was losing contact with the servers, as such the servers were stopping the render and restarting when the manager eventually found the server, but the cycle continued throughout the night and only the server running on the manager machine was maintaining a connection.
So obviously the first thing I did was restart all the machine and watch what was happening. The first clue I got was when the machines actually restarted, yesterday was Microsoft patch Tuesday and all the machines had received an update...
After the machines had updated and restarted I check for more updates [because you know, theres always more than one...] and installed the remaining updates, I then started manager and server, all good, I added an additional server, Max began to start the server log reported it had received a job and was ready... but then nothing happened.
So, I uninstalled and reinstalled the latest version of backburner from the ADSK App Store, restarted the manager and server machines submitted a job only to find max was just ready.... but did not render on the server node. manager was reporting it was still losing the connection to the server...
Quick search of the Area and there was a post from Alfred DeFlamini with links to an article about post Creators Update: Unable to Broadcast Servers, within the article there is a link to an external site with instructions how to manually configure your Services Desktop app to re-enable network visibility and discovery.
https://www.ghacks.net/2018/04/17/fix-pcs-no-longer-recognized-in-network-after-windows-10-version-1...
After performing these steps Servers are talking to and Manager is listening, rendering has been restored and the gentle hum of fans are restoring the warm glow to the office.
If you are experiencing issues I recommend you follow the steps in the GHacks.net link to fix the Microsoft issue, you don't need to touch backburner, change any settings, and you certainly dont need to uninstall and reinstall backburner. Hopefully this gets you back to rendering quicker than I will be, as I now get to spend the day resubmitting all the jobs that were in the render queue.
Happy rendering...
