Troubleshooting Tips and Warnings

If you have problems running the Render Farm. Here is a list of items to check.

• CINELERRA-GG must be installed on the master node and all client machines.
• It is best to have the same username available on all nodes to avoid problems with access rights.
• Check file permissions and ownership to ensure that the clients all have access.
• If a node does not have access to an input asset it will not die, but just display error messages.
• If a node can not access an output asset, the rendering will abort.
• A port in use when stopped may take up to 30 seconds to time out before you can restart the jobs.
• Each of the port combinations have to be unique across clients, and not already in use in the network.
• CINELERRA-GG load balances on a first come, first serve basis. If the last section of the video is sent to the slowest node, the render job will have to wait for the slowest node to finish. It would be better to start on the slowest node with the earlier section of the video so keep that in mind when designating port numbers.
• If not running as root, a port number in the higher range of 10650 and above must be used instead of the 401 + range.
• The master and client jobs on the ports do not go away so if you want to stop them, you will have to kill them via: kill PID#.
• Check to see if there are services listening on the ports to use: netstat -n -l -4 –protocol inet
• There is a watchdog timer in CINELERRA-GG and if there is no response from a client in the designated number of seconds, it will kill the render job.
• The localhost should exist as 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts and as the lo network device in ifconfig.
• If the job loads become unbalanced, you may want to reset rates to start over for new framerates.
• If jobs are split in a key section on the timeline, you may wish to use labels to prevent this.
• For testing purposes, you may want to start a client in the foreground using -f instead of -d.
• If one of the client computers is unavailable, check to see if there is an X to the left of the nodename in the Nodes listbox. Check the X to disable it which sets ON to OFF.
• A red message in the lower left hand corner of the main timeline that reads Failed to start render farm often means that the client CINELERRA-GG programs were not started up.
• A message of RenderFarmWatchdog::run 1 killing server thread
  #address# means that the client did not respond in time. You can adjust the timer in Settings → Preferences, Performance tab.
• When you get the message RenderFarmClient::main_loop: bind port 400: Address already in use, use a different port. See /etc/services for free ports.
• A message of RenderFarmServerThread::open_client: unknown host abcompany means that the hostname of abcompany is not in /etc/hosts so you will have to add it or use the ip address instead.
• There are numerous error messages associated with file open/close/status or problems with the file that should be dealt with according to what is printed out.
• Other illustrative messages may be shown such as: RenderFarmClientThread:: run: Session finished.

And here are a couple of more tips for making Render Farm specific for your setup.

• Because index files speed up displaying the video you may want to share these files with the clients on a shared filesystem. More information on index files configuration is outlined in 16.5.3.
• Or, one of the convenient features of CINELERRA-GG is the redirection of the path via CIN_CONFIG as in:

  CIN_CONFIG="/<shared_file_pathname>/<filename_such_as_.bcast5>" cin
  

  This means that you can make project related configurations that do not impact the default $HOME config. You can either export your default $HOME config or the CIN_CONFIG config to use on the render farm.

Warnings

If one of the render farm computers is connected to the internet, you should use a firewall to maintain the safety of all of the computers. The ports have to be reachable for the intranet but you do not want the ports to be open to the outside.