Maxwell Render

I have done precisely the following steps:

1) Installed Ubuntu 11.04 Desktop from CD
2) Set the IP address to a hard-coded 192.168.1.200, netmask 255.255.255.0
3) Unpacked Maxwell into the /home/farm/maxwell64-2.5 directory
4) Copied my license.txt file into that directory
5) Ran dpkg to install openssh-server and xvfd
6) Added an "export MAXWELL2_ROOT..." and an "xfvd-run -n 1 ..." line for mxnetwork in /etc/rc.local

It _almost_ works. mxnetwork does run on boot, and can connect to a render manager, and can even render jobs. But, it doesn't quite work properly because:

1) It has some issues connecting with the manager (which is running on a Windows 7 box). It cannot "find" the manager by itself, even though they are both on the same subnet. It must be told what the IP of the manager is explicitly, via a -node:192.168.1.101 parameter, which is not too terrible, but the real problem is that if the manager is restarted, it _cannot reconnect_. You must kill the mxnetwork on the Ubuntu box and manually restart it in order for it to connect again. That's a bit of a showstopper.

2) It cannot seem to send data back to the manager, although the manager can apparently send data to it just fine. It receives all the files for the render (I can visually inspect that they are there in the Ubuntu machine's tmp/mxnetwork directory structure, and appears to be doing the actual work of rendering, but once the job is complete or stopped, it never sends any results back to the manager. And, if you try to request a preview, it never returns one. There is no error given on the manager side for either of these.

So, any ideas on what's going on here? I'm assuming this is some kind of port blockage or permissions problem. What are the things that the mxnetwork communications layer needs in order to work properly? I suspect I could probably figure this out if I had more Linux skillz, but, sadly, I do not.

Thanks,
- Casey

You could try to turn off the firewall(s), just make sure windows own isn't running.
If that is the (only) problem, then the linux node should automatically find the manager.
And also you should be able to find the shared folder in windows from the linux machine. The firewall can block that as well, think windows has port 443 or 445 for samba protocol, can't really remember the number exactly.

Make sure that you are running the same port range in both node and manager (default 45454 - 45474)

(disconnecting the computers temporary from the net is a tip )