mental ray satellite setup

[DarkLane]

Hmmm, can anyone help? I keep getting this error when I start a frame render from within Maya.
I'm running 4 Fedora 13 machines and the master is a Win 7 machine. I can ping them all just fine and the firewall port on 7410 is clear both on samba and the router. I've installed the satellites on the fedora boxes and Maya 2010 is installed on the master machine. My maya.rayhosts file is the user folder with the name and port identified. Do I need to install a service on the master? This is definitely not in the documentation. Any help appreciated

Error message

mental ray for Maya 2010
mental ray: version 3.7.53.5, Jun 17 2009, revision 88216
initMPS with licenseOption 0
mental ray: got 8 satellite CPUs.
MSG 0.0 error 011329: mi-ray/tcp: not a service (check %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\services)
MSG 0.0 warn 012219: using fallback inet service 7003
MSG 0.0 error 011213: cannot receive welcome message from host 1 (active)
MSG 0.0 error 011706: cannot add host VALIANT:7410
MSG 0.0 fatal 011513: SLAVE 1 DIED
MSG 0.0 fatal 011513: SLAVE 1 DIED

[bart]

This should be in the installation documentation. The mi-ray service should have been installed on the master. Did you check the etc/services file it mentions to confirm that the mi-ray service is in there (usually at the bottom of the file)? Did you install as the Administrative user?

[van_der_goes]

This should be in the installation documentation. The mi-ray service should have been installed on the master. Did you check the etc/services file it mentions to confirm that the mi-ray service is in there (usually at the bottom of the file)? Did you install as the Administrative user?

Sorry for the silly question, but how can I install the mi-ray service on the master? Maya doesn't install it automatically.

[bart]

It should. What OS? Have you reported it to AD?

[van_der_goes]

I'm on windows 7 64 bit, but I had the same behavior under xp64. Mi-ray is not displayed under the service tab of the master machine. To make satellite work without errors or warnings in the output window I always had to add manually the line "mi-ray portNumber" to system32/drivers/etc/service of the master pc. I did not report it to autodesk because I didn't know maya should have installed this service.

[van_der_goes]

May a non-english version of the os cause problems - in general not only on this particular issue? I'm on Italian version of win7

[steve]

To my knowledge,

Autodesk products use service names that change with each new version of mentalray. That is actually recommended for separation if multiple mentalray (or DCCs with mentalray) versions might be installed on the same machine. On my machine I see the following services (that were added automatically by the Max/Maya installers):

mi-raysat-3dsmax2011_32 7513/tcp
mi-raysat-3dsmax2011_64 7514/tcp
mi-raysat2011 7411/tcp
mi-raysat2012 7412/tcp

The service name mi-ray is the fallback service name used by standalone mentalray.

Hope that helps.
Best, Steve.

[van_der_goes]

Thank you Steve. From my experiece 3ds max installs by default the raysat service on the master machine along with max installation. Maya does not install this, since there is a separate mr satellite installer that woud install the raysat service. From my understanding this is to use only on slave machines, master should not have this service running or at least this is not useful. I am right? But, to make the same error DarkLane is getting, (MSG 0.0 error 011329: mi-ray/tcp: not a service (check %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\services)
MSG 0.0 warn 012219: using fallback inet service 7003) go away, I have to edit manually the service file (like suggested in the error output), adding the line "mi-ray 7412/tcp" (for maya 2012), even if this is supposed to refer to a service installed by mental ray standalone (that is not installed). Does this make any sense to you?

Thank you,
Paolo

[steve]

I see what you mean.

Fortunately, I have these services properly set up on the master Maya machine because I tend to always install the mental ray satellite on the master (in addition to the slaves)

Surprisingly, looks like not recommended by the Maya installation manual, which claims that the satellite installer needs to be executed only on the slave machines. That is certainly true for the installation of the service daemon that starts mental ray satellite upon request from the master. But, the service name, that is the entry in the etc/services file we are talking about, is not used on the slave machines at all; it is really only needed on the master computer.

Easiest solution would be to run the satellite installer on your master computer as well.

Alternatively, you can add the service name for your Maya version to the etc/services file yourself. For Maya2012, it should read

mi-raysat2012    7412/tcp

It will publish mi-raysat2012 as a service name in your computer system. Any communication software, like mental ray, can query this name and determine the actual port assigned to it.

After that, you need to edit your personal Maya.env file and add the following entry (if not existing already):

MI_RAY_SERVICE=mi-raysat2012

This will announce the service name that mental ray should use for addressing the (compatible) satellites on the other machines. Especially, it allows to avoid explicit port numbers when adding slave computers in the maya.rayhosts file. If your satellite computer is called "moon", your maya.rayhosts file would read:

# This is my satellite machine
moon

Without the service name established, you would have to change that to:

# This is my satellite machine
moon:7412

Many people are OK with this workaround. But then you would have to remember the specific port number, for each new version of Maya and Max and Soft.

Without this exercise above, you end up with the problems as you describe:

It appears, Maya2012 has not set the MI_RAY_SERVICE properly. If you try to add a satellite by machine name, mental ray has no information which port to use for communication. It tries to find it by falling back to its built-in defaults:

1. First, try the fallback service name mi-ray to determine the port.
2. Next, try the fallback port number 7003 instead.

Both of the fallbacks are going to fail, since Maya2012 is using port 7412 for network rendering.


Became a long text I really hope it explains the - rather nasty - technical details.

Best, Steve.

[van_der_goes]

Thank you so much Steve!
I modified my network configuration with your suggestions and now it works! No errors and no warns.
This is the way things must get done. The only thing that scares me is that Maya installation guide is wrong. Autodesk didn't understand how satellite should be installed!
Anyway I really really thank you.

Best,

Paolo