I have problems with HQ cloud render under Apprentice HD on Mac os X lion 10.7.1. Everything work up to the point where i'm submitting to the cloud render, then nothing happens. Houdini do not launch the web interface. I have tried to reinstall. Tried different versions, different computers but on on Mac OS X it docent launch the web interface. I guess you don't need to install HQueue server for the cloud render (if i try the installer fails and the logs says there is no valid HQ render license, wich is true for the HD version). Does anyone have any solutions ?

I have the same issue. I have been trying to set up HQueue Cloud Render for Houdini Apprentice HD 11.1.67, on Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8.

You do need to install HQueue Server for cloud render, if you don't then you won't see the HQueue node in Houdini, which you need to setup and run the cloud render.

Unfortunately when you run the Houdini 10.6.7 installer with the HQueue Server installation option, the installer fails at the end of the installation; as far as I can tell it installs Houdini fine, but does not install HQueue Server correctly. So, when you setup your HQueue Cloud Render it all goes fine until you submit the render to Amazon, and then the HQueue Browser does not launch and nothing happens.

I opened a bug report regarding this with SFX yesterday.

Please do the same and submit a bug report to SFX at http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=768&Itemid=239 [sidefx.com], this will help them fix it quicker, as they will know it is affecting other Mac OS X users. There support is very good, they come back to you very quickly.

The HQueue Render node should be available without installing HQueue server.

Hi All,

You don't have to install the HQueue server in order to submit render jobs to the Cloud. You just need Houdini installed.

Anyway, I gave cloud job submission another try today from my Mac and it worked. I know that that doesn't help much but maybe we can find some similarities/differences in our setups. I tested with a Mac OSX 10.6.7 as well so I don't think it's a OSX version issue. I also used the latest Houdini, build 11.1.72.

The issues that everyone is running into could be network-related. For example, I did notice today that my first test submission failed temporarily because our office was briefly experiencing some DNS problems.

One thing you can try the next time a cloud submission fails, see if you can get a copy of the cloudsubmit.log file. This is a log file that is generated by a background process that Houdini spawns in order to communicate with the cloud. So if cloud jobs are failing, there is a good chance that an error is recorded in cloudsubmit.log.

On a Mac, cloudsubmit.log is created in a temporary location, usually in /var/folders. So to find cloudsubmit.log, open a Terminal app and in the terminal type:
find /var/folders -name cloudsubmit.log

Once you know the location of cloudsubmit.log, grab a copy and send it to me and I'll see if there is anything suspicious mentioned in it.

Cheers,
Rob

Hi Rob,

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

I just tested again, the problem is that after I press the button “Yes, Proceed”, on the Submission Confirmation Screen nothing happens, there is no feedback at all.

Am I right in saying that a browser should appear?

I had a look to see if there a cloudsubmit.log had been created, but there hadn't.

Yeah. You are correct. A browser page should open saying that a computer is launching on the cloud.

Ok, so if there is no cloudsubmit.log file and no browser page, then the cloudsubmit daemon must have failed on startup. So let's try manually starting cloudsubmit in the foreground so that we can see any errors that it generates.

Here's what you can do to manually start cloudsubmit:
1) First check the $HIP directory of the .hip file you tried to submit a render job from. There should be a file ending with “.project_parms”. This is the parameter file that Houdini generates to instruct cloudsubmit what to do. Remember the path and name of this file, say <project_parm_path>. If there are multiple .project_parms files, you can arbitrarily choose any one of them.

2) Open a Houdini Shell.terminal app. The following commands will be executed in the terminal.

3) Copy the AWS secret access key file to a temporary location:
cp <secret_access_key_file> /tmp/temp_key_file
where <secret_access_key_file> will either be $HOME/Library/Preferences/houdini/11.1/aws/secret-access-key or $HOME/houdini11.1/aws/secret-access-key depending on how you started Houdini the first time you tried to submit a job to the cloud.

4) Manually start cloudsubmit:
export HOUDINI_PYTHON_VERSION=2.6 && export HSCRIPT_NO_HISTORY=1 && $HFS/bin/hython -m cloudsubmit -d <project_parm_path> /tmp/temp_key_file

Once cloudsubmit starts up, it should be echoing log messages to the terminal. If it magically succeeds, then the browser page will open and cloudsubmit will continue to spit out messages. But if it fails to start up, there will be no browser page and you should see an error message.

Paste the error message here and I can take a look at it.

Sorry for the long message but I'm hoping that this will guide us to the root of the problem.

Cheers,
Rob

Oh. I just received some info here.

There's a bug where submitting render jobs to the cloud will fail if your .hip file path contains spaces. So if you have spaces in the path, try removing them (or simply move your .hip file to another location) and resubmit.

I've committed a fix so you can also try tomorrow's build.

Cheers,
Rob

hi
I have the same problem on Mac OS Lion.
after starting the renderer, the browser does not appear and does not show task manager.

Can you help with anything?

And how to read log file?
home-imac:Resources gilmanov$ sudo find /var/folders -name cloudsubmit.log
Password:
/var/folders/_h/77hc07t54pd2pvwnj1rcnkh80000gn/T/cloudsubmit.log

I'm getting the same problem and have run Rob's diagnostics. When running the hq renderer the cloudsubmit.log only contains the following:

2012-02-21 23:09:39,993 INFO: cloudsubmit starting up

However when running Rob's shell command I get the following errors:
INFO:cloudsubmit:cloudsubmit starting upsler_CloudTests.03.project_parms /tmp/temp_key_file $Hy_file
ERROR:cloudsubmit:Error when setting AWS key: The secret access key you entered previously is not valid.

INFO:cloudsubmit:_shutdown
INFO:cloudsubmit:shutdown called
ERROR:cloudsubmit:Traceback (most recent call last):
ERROR:cloudsubmit: File “/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/runpy.py”, line 122, in _run_module_as_main
ERROR:cloudsubmit: File “/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/runpy.py”, line 34, in _run_code
ERROR:cloudsubmit: File “/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Versions/11.1.201/Resources/houdini/python2.6libs/cloudsubmit.py”, line 1671, in <module>
ERROR:cloudsubmit: startWithSysArgs()
ERROR:cloudsubmit: File “/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Versions/11.1.201/Resources/houdini/python2.6libs/cloudsubmit.py”, line 55, in startWithSysArgs
ERROR:cloudsubmit: start(project_parms_path, temp_file_with_key, debug, verbose)
ERROR:cloudsubmit: File “/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Versions/11.1.201/Resources/houdini/python2.6libs/cloudsubmit.py”, line 76, in start
ERROR:cloudsubmit: _loadAWSKey(temp_file_with_key, project_parms)
ERROR:cloudsubmit: File “/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Versions/11.1.201/Resources/houdini/python2.6libs/cloudsubmit.py”, line 142, in _loadAWSKey
ERROR:cloudsubmit: _shutdown(error=True)
ERROR:cloudsubmit: File “/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Versions/11.1.201/Resources/houdini/python2.6libs/cloudsubmit.py”, line 1018, in _shutdown
ERROR:cloudsubmit: raise ExitThread()
ERROR:cloudsubmit:__main__.ExitThread
Marvin:houdini ahessler$ Could not initialize the help server:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “<stdin>”, line 1, in <module>
File “/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Versions/11.1.201/Resources/houdini/python2.6libs/houdinihelp/__init__.py”, line 38, in <module>
from houdinihelp.wiki import WIKI, page_to_html, string_to_html, string_to_xml
File “/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Versions/11.1.201/Resources/houdini/python2.6libs/houdinihelp/wiki.py”, line 10, in <module>
from wikiparser.filters.trees import (block_attribute_elements, color_syntax, group_by_type,
File “/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Versions/11.1.201/Resources/houdini/python2.6libs/wikiparser/filters/trees.py”, line 20, in <module>
from pygments.lexers import get_lexer_by_name
File “/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Versions/11.1.201/Resources/python/lib/python2.6/site-packages/pygments/lexers/__init__.py”, line 21, in <module>
from pygments.plugin import find_plugin_lexers
File “/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Versions/11.1.201/Resources/python/lib/python2.6/site-packages/pygments/plugin.py”, line 39, in <module>
import pkg_resources
File “/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Versions/11.1.201/Resources/python/lib/python2.6/site-packages/pkg_resources.py”, line 657, in <module>
class Environment(object):
File “/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Versions/11.1.201/Resources/python/lib/python2.6/site-packages/pkg_resources.py”, line 660, in Environment
def __init__(self, search_path=None, platform=get_supported_platform(), python=PY_MAJOR):
File “/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Versions/11.1.201/Resources/python/lib/python2.6/site-packages/pkg_resources.py”, line 55, in get_supported_platform
plat = get_build_platform(); m = macosVersionString.match(plat)
File “/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Versions/11.1.201/Resources/python/lib/python2.6/site-packages/pkg_resources.py”, line 187, in get_build_platform
plat = get_platform()
File “/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/distutils/util.py”, line 98, in get_platform
File “/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/distutils/sysconfig.py”, line 537, in get_config_vars
File “/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/distutils/sysconfig.py”, line 405, in _init_posix
DistutilsPlatformError: invalid Python installation: unable to open /usr/include/python2.6/pyconfig.h (No such file or directory)

Hope that helps debug. It implies the secret key is wrong… but I'm not sure how that could be. I double checked it and it appears to be correct in houdini.

Thanks,
Alex

Have you tried creating a new key on Amazon and copy pasting this into Houdini?

You don't say which build of Mac OS X and Houdini you are using, which makes it hard for anyone to help…

Hi, yes sorry. I'm using 11.1.201 on osx lion 10.7.3. I tried a different key and got the same error in the shell and behavior in houdini (no browser or error message).

I would submit a bug report.
You can do this here http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=768&Itemid=239 [sidefx.com]
I am still using Mac OS X 10.6.8.

Other users appear to have issues with HQueue Cloud Render on Mac OS X Lion.
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=24835 [sidefx.com]