Hassan’s Work Blog

Last day of the quarter, nothing much going on.

Two students had problems loggin in, ran the del_csc script and all was good for them.

Two other students were unable to burn their dvds. One of them was just stressed out and did not know what she was doing and so i showed her how to write a CD using Roxio.

The other was unable to see his DVD drive pop up for some reason, i quickly asked him to login and it was working down here. So all is good.

Tomorrow, we start preparing items for next quarters image. Lets hope for the best.

Signing out,

Hassan.

Worked on Kirt Witte’s laptop for all the updates that he required, the same are required for the visual effects testing machine which will be tackled on Monday.

Lots of hard disk space issues on his laptop, took me the 2 days to get this done.

Following are the apps/changes installed/made:

- Admin rights (username Kirt already exists)

- Removed Novell client

- Ran updates for all CS4 products

- installed and activated Vue 8

- Installed Stitcher 2009 Sp1

- HDRPhotoStudio

- Picturenaut

- Light Room Beta 3

- Skype (requested by Kirt Witte)

The same changes will be made to the vfx testing machine.

Working on Kirt Wittes laptop, its going to take a while as there are alot of things to update.

The renderfarm went offline but Tom was here to fix it and got it back online.

Some animation students are having issues with rendering their files, one case was a paths issues with absolute paths instead of relative, the same student reported the same issue of not being able to render, i emailed the student to send us the maya project file but i never got a reply back.

Tomorrow i will continue to work on Kirt’s laptop and also some changes for the VSFX testing machine.

Tom will also update the renderfarm with RenderMan for Maya 2.0.1 as we have been having issues with students not getting their shaders recognized on the farm, locally they can render without any glitches.

Its been a while since i updated anything against this. But alot has been going on with Massive. I am currently involved in a group project for the Mocap Class. I am helping with all the Massive shots, its supposed to be a battle scene between two armies of crocs and bird men. Had to deal with alot of issues with this one.

Will post the technical details soon: for now here is a screen grab from the project.

A student Greg Radcliffe was having issues with rendering. He was only able to see one frame in his job folder where as the job status on the farm showed that every frame has been successfully rendered.

What i found was that in his render setting he had “renumber frames using” checked on and that was replacing all his frames with one again and again.

Unchecking this option fixes it, i tested and verified this. Emailed the student with the appropriate instructions.

Downloaded Houdini 10 for win/linux as per Dan’s request. Also, in their download area it mentions that for Houdini 10, Visual Studio 2005 is the recommended compiling platform to have installed. On this note, i was wondering if thats why Houdini is crashing in Atlanta because we have shifted to VS 2008 now. Will have to explore this further with some testing.

It seems that who ever copied the new linux images from the mobile station to SFDM-GHOST did not copy all the files properly, only the main image file was copied and the subsequent numbered files were never transferred, same goes for the Z600 images.

This is the reason why Ben had issues re-imaging malcolm’s PC and kept getting a corrupted image error. I am running a session right now from the mobile station, when its done i will copy the files to the Ghost Server.

Also installed RenderManProServer 15.0 on seven machines in 223 (teachers station and 02,03,04,19,20,21) as requested by Professor Malcolm. I will also install RPS 15.0 on his new test machine.

Body paint was not responding in the grad lab, we get an error that says “Wrong Serial Number for Body Paint 3D”. Tried re-registering it but it does seem to work. I tried using all serials available for body paint but i get an expired error.

221 and 204 are all good, Body paint works fine.

Rest everything was pretty much quiet, the tour went fine. No one came in to the Systems Office.

Also, Andres from the cage needed the Network port tester but i was unable to find it.

The new join domain script is very simple, its only around 7 or 8 lines, im invoking it in our postghost script at the point when the machine has been renamed and then it calls the script, joins the domain based on the credentials provided to us by Christian and then deletes itself since we the script has the user and pass in it.

Currently, running a sysprepped image with the new join domain vbs script along with the postghost script we always use.

Following machines are imaging: Z600  - Systems Office

Mont-109-04, Mont-110-21, Mont-120-18

The 6600 base has been reverted back to the updated base image without sysprep.

Lots of work being undertaken by the Systems Office these days. Not only were we learning updcast and sysprep but we’ve also had to make some changes to the way the postghost scripts run that enable us to rename a machine here at Monty.

For now, we’re going to stick with Norton Ghost as we know it works well for multicasting.

One additional script had to be written that would join the Active Directory domain after the renaming process is complete. I tested out the script on one 8400 and a z600, it works fine and joins the domain as expected.

We were getting some access denied errors at times but Phong said it is to be expected specially because for testing purposes we were joining and disjoining the domain so often and also some other synchronisations are being made by the people at Propes Hall and so these network delays is what is causing this.

Now ive incorporated the new domain joining scripts along with postghost scripts and ive sysprepped the image and am capturing it right now. Hopefully should test the image tomorrow on some 6600s, 8400s and one Z600 just to be sure that after imaging, the machine renames properly and joins the new domain.