Hi all, I am hoping I can get some help on setting up a Mac hqueue farm. I've set up an hqueue farm for an all-Windows network and it works great.

It may be worth noting that on the Windows farm, whenever we submit a job to Hqueue server via an Hqueue ROP we set the Target HFS directory to “C:\Program Files\Side Effects Software\Houdini 13.0.343” so that (I guess) the client machine finds the Houdini installation. I did not bother setting up a shared directory where client machines could download Houdini from a central location.

For the Mac farm, I've got Hqueue Server running on an OS X machine and have added three Macs as clients. They show up in the Hqueue Clients page and are available to render. Houdini runs just fine on all of them

The problem I'm having happens after submitting from the Hqueue ROP. At first I tried setting the Target HFS directory to
/Applications/Houdini 13.0.343/. That resulted in the error “No Such File or Directory”. I then removed the space so it read /Applications/Houdini13.0.343/ (and changed all the Houdini directories to match) and that sort of worked but not in the right way. Now the Hqueue Server error reads /houdini_setup: No such file or directory.

I looked in the Houdini install directory on the Windows machines and such a file exists, but on the OS X machines, “houdini_setup” does not exist, so the error makes sense and confirms that at least I've formatted the path correctly.

Is the only way to get the Mac clients to work is to set up the Shared directory and place a Houdini installation in that shared folder? I definitely haven't tried that yet but I just figure if Houdini is already installed on the client machines, why make them download it from a shared directory?

Thanks for any help/suggestions!

Hello,

For HQueue rendering on OS X mantra render clients, trying pointing Target HFS to:

/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Versions/Current/Resources

This will choose the latest installed version of Houdini to be run by the OS X HQueue client node script.

Hope this helps.

PS. Setting up a shared directory for Houdini distributions will help make Houdini version management for the render farm easier, though it does come at the expense of a longer startup time depending on how heavy the file server is hit.

Cheers,
tk

Thanks so much, TK, that definitely helped! Hqueue now reports that it's finding Houdini but unfortunately I'm getting a different error when the clients try to open the file.

Here's the Hqueue command output:
The Houdini 13.0.343 environment has been initialized.
ERROR: Cannot open file /Volumes/MainDirectory/SubDirectory/hqueue_mac_test.hipnc

The file lives on a Windows Server machine.

I can access the file from any of the render client machines without issue.
When I use “ls” on the “/Volumes” directory I see “MainDirectory” in the list.

Any ideas? Thanks again for the help earlier!

I believe that is due to OS X automatically removing (or unmounting) the Windows share in /Volumes/MainDirectory once you log out from your account on the Mac render nodes. This results in the HQueue client and Houdini not being able to find the MainDirectory share and the hqueue_mac_test.hipnc file.

One simple way is to leave your interactive user session logged on in the Mac render nodes with the Windows share mounted.

The preferred method is to use automount to create a permanent mount point and mount the Windows share for each Mac render node at bootup. You can find some useful tips on using automount in this blog:

http://useyourloaf.com/blog/2011/01/24/using-the-mac-os-x-automounter.html [useyourloaf.com]

Cheers,
tk

Thanks again, TK. That was a helpful article.

I had set up /Main Directory to load as a login item, so after restarting the machine it did show up in the /Volumes list as /Main Directory.

I assume I am right to format the file path in the Hqueue node as “/Volumes/Main Directory…” and not just “/Main Directory…” I'm just not getting how a user would set off a render on a PC, for instance, with the path to the hip file looking like “//Server/Main Directory…” and expect the Mac client machines to understand the path.

Thanks again for the help, tho!