The Official Blog
It’s much easier for me to update the main Dumball blog, so follow our updates there! http://blog.dumball.org
If you haven’t donated yet, go to our fundraising page at http://www.justgiving.com/team-ditt
Cheers!
B
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IDP
At this rate we will be ready to leave in a few days … shame we have to be gone in a few hours. Now where did i put my adventure hat?
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So, one-upmanship, eh?
So, YOU might have a visa.. I have this:
Nyaaa nyaa nya nyaaa nyaaa
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Half way there
Well i have one … thats a start and there is nearly 18h before the start line
One down
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Last minute prep
With the start line quickly approaching its time to take stock of the current level of readyness. We have a car (a surprise to us all), that car is insured although a V5 might be pushing it. OK, i think that is the “have” section finished with. Lets review the list of issues that would be a problem with normal trips.
- neither of the drivers currently has a passport (as the embassy has them)
- we havent looked where we are going on friday
- we havent checked that we can get home on sunday from the airport
- I dont have a bag to pack things into
- we havent thought about packing other than this post
- we dont have any local currency
Dumball is a state of impending disaster will a balancing expectation that it will all turn out for the best. This year we have got in the mood before the start line
State of readyness
Tags: Dumball Posted in
It’s Dumball time again!
Okay, so - I’ve been a bit quiet recently because I’ve had my head into work.. However, it was recently brought to my attention that there are less than two weeks to go.
Ooops
So, Proto came over today and we decided that the day would not end without us finding a vehicle to take us on our epic journey to Finland. We started the day by trawling all of the various car dealerships in the Slough area. Now, this seemed like a good idea at the time, but it seems that car dealerships have absolutely no interest in keeping, or getting rid of old part-ex vehicles. Feeling a little despondent, we picked up several copies of the local Ad pages and started reading all the private ads for a potential mark.
We found several potential cars, but one stood out to us:
Saab 9000 Griffin
3.0 V6 1995 M reg, Black, full Cream leather, electric heated memory seats, air con, cruise control, e/w, e/m, e/s/r, r/c/l, CD, computer, 76k genuine miles, MOT August, tax June, vgc, has oil leak, £350
So, all seems good apart from the “Has Oil Leak”. So, a quick phone call later we determine that the oil leak is very slight - just requires topping up occasionally.
Well, after one of our squadron managed to complete last year whilst dumping substantial amounts of transmission fluid all the time, we figure a small oil leak is going to be minimal!
So, we get in the car for the two hour trek to Folkstone to meet Andy. Deep in the depths of the Kent countryside we find him and the car for sale. We take it for a test drive and…
IT’S BLOODY GORGEOUS!
So, with a quick detour to pick up some more money, we finally paid up, shared a beer with Andy then went on our way.
Proto would like me to reiterate this point:
IT’S BLOODY GORGEOUS!
So, onwards and upwards - time to ‘convert’ it slightly 
B.
ButterflyNetRender on Linux
I recently started a new job, working for an animation company based at Pinewood studios.
One of my first tasks was to build their new render farm, which far outstripped their existing farm.
The basic setup is this:
1. 2 x Quad core Xeon processor domain controllers w/4×500GB RAID hard drives.
2. 2 x Thecus 1U4500 NAS boxes loaded with 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda drives (4.5TB useable in each)
3. 64 Render nodes, comprising Intel i7-920 / 8GB memory
4. Gigabit-to-the-node on a dedicated backbone.
Initially, the plan was to run XP64 on the render nodes, utilising BNR, with the BNR Controller running on one of the domain controllers. However, after a little work I managed to convince the head of R&D to try running Linux on the render nodes.
I initially followed the “authoratitive” source for configuring BNR on Linux (found here) which was absolutely excellent. However, I found that the native BNR client for Linux seemed a little emasculated when compared to the features available in the Windows client. This set me on the path towards finding a better solution.
At the end of the day, I decided that it would be worthwhile trying out the Windows BNR client under WINE. This is how I did it.
The initial environment
All of our scenes and objects are stored on our primary NAS box (cunningly codenamed NEWT) and both the lw9.cfg and the lwext9.cfg files are configured as read-only, with all plugins referred to by UNC paths. We have seperated out the content and the frames into two shares: \\newt\content and \\newt\frames.
In addition, on the animation workstations, we map network drives via group policy:
- r: -> \\newt\frames
- s: -> \\newt\content
Render node Configuration
To install the render nodes, I used the latest Fedora Core 10 x86_64 ISO. I did a fairly minimalist install using the GNOME desktop, and ensured that WINE was also installed.
During the installation, I configured a local user called ‘nodelogin’.
Post installation, I did the following:
Create a folder: /lightwave, and within it create both frames and content.
Mount the shares from the NAS box via /etc/fstab. Luckily, this particular NAS box supports NFS as well as SMB, and I do prefer NFS so I mounted //newt/content to /lightwave/content and //newt/frames to /lightwave/frames using nfs.
Create symbolic links in /home/nodelogin/.wine/dosdevices:
ln -s /lightwave/content s: ln -s /lightwave/frames r:
Create symbolic links in /home/nodelogin/.wine/dosdevices/unc :
cd /home/nodelogin/.wine/dosdevices/unc mkdir newt cd newt ln -s /lightwave/content content ln -s /lightwave/frames frames
Having both of these means I can access data either via s: or via \\newt\content.
Next up, I ran the installer for the ButterflyNetRenderClient through wine. The installation ran fine. The only peculiarity that I came across was the BNR controller configuration. It seems that specifying the location of the LWSN.EXE file using a UNC map fails (Can’t read message table) so I had to specify the location in the controller using a mapped drive. Everything else in the config generally uses UNC maps.
As the render nodes have nice hefty quad-core Hyperthreaded processors in them (appears as 8-cores, mmmm) I set the node count per machine to 4 in the BNR client. For debugging purposes, I like to see the node output, so I went to Advanced and selected the window state to be ‘Show’ on all four nodes. This brings me to the second problem I encountered, (and as yet have not found a solution for).
Currently, when the nodes start up only the output from node 1 and node 2 is displayed on-screen. node3 and node4 run detached with no visible output. It appears that the BNR Client executes the lwsn.exe file for the first two nodes using: “CMD /K /D xxxx” but for the other two nodes just using “CMD” which WINE immediately detaches. At the moment I’m living with it, but would like to get it fixed!
Remote Access
VNC is a useful tool for viewing the remote desktop. Fortunately, it’s built-in to GNOME. All you need to do is go to System->Preferences->Internet and Network->Remote Desktop and enable it.
Autorun and Autologin
It’s handy to be able to auto-run the BNR client on machine-start. To do this, go to System->Preferences->Personal->Sessions and add an entry that simply runs ‘wine “C:\\Program Files\\ButterflyNetrenderClient4\ButterflyNode.exe”‘
To enable AutoLogin on GNOME, edit /etc/gdm/gdm.schemas Make sure the <default> value for daemon/AutomaticLogin is set to ‘nodelogin’ (or whatever your local user is). Also make sure that the <default> value for daemon/AutomaticLoginEnable is set to true.
Niggly things:
- node3 and node4 do not show their terminals
- Restart client, when issued from the BNR controller, does not seem to work.
- I havent figured out Logging yet - the logfile always appears empty
I’ll update here if I find any solutions, or further developments!
B.
EDIT: It appears that the Restart Client does work, but it loses all shell windows so every LWSN shell runs detached, with no output.
EDIT2: The logfiles are being created, but Wine doesn’t understand the “short names” that are generated when notepad is spawned to view the file.
Tags: bnr linux lightwave wine fedora Posted in
We’re doing the Dumball 09!
Woot!
Applications for the Dumball 09 - Highway to Hel(sinki) are now closed, and I’m pleased to announce that I received a congratulatory email from the organisers saying that our team is in this year!
Proto and I will definately be going along together, along with a mystery third member (only a mystery because we haven’t finalised who it will be yet :P)
I’ve already decided what our theme will be this year, so if anyone knows of a *cheap* Mazda 323 5-door going, feel free to email me.
I’ll be putting up the obligatory Justgiving link soon, so get ready to stick your hand in your pocket and donate to a good cause! This year the Dumball are supporting the Teenage Cancer Trust.
B.
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Moredom
So, I just finished helping my sister redesign her company website. Anyone who knows me knows that I hate doing websites so I decided to switch her to a CMS. For no particular reason I chose to use www.cmsmadesimple.org and it’s great
Still got to flesh it out a bit, but it’s up in nearly-finished mode at http://www.nifty-group.co.uk
DNS will update properly eventually - for the moment it’s doing a nasty redirect to my personal website.
Still waiting to hear whether our team is in the Dumball this year, although I’m quietly confident. Should hear over the next few days, fingers crossed.
I’m looking at suitable geekery to take with me on the Dumball in ‘09. I’m planning some major upgrades to the tracking software I used last time. Chris Moos, the guy who wrote it originally has open sourced the server and client, so that will make it much easier for me to add the modifications that I’d like to do. The Open LBS Server can be seen at http://openlbs.tech9computers.com.
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Dumball 09 - Back to Black
So, it’s Dumball application time again. The doors have opened and applications are being submitted. We put ours in a week or so ago detailing our plan, our car and our fancy dress.
It’s all hush-hush at the moment, but Nathan from NG Autos in Yeovil may have already found us the perfect car. More will be revealed soon!
So, I’ve rallied up Proto and told him he’s going next year (Proto is a bit snowed under with finishing his PhD thesis and finding a job at the moment, so I decided to take the option of refusing away from him and make the decision for him). I’m trying to decide on our third member - if I can get Owen to actually commit to a week away then that would be awesome. Maybe Ric will be available - who can tell?
Anyway, fingers crossed that we’ll be Dumballers in ‘09.
B.
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