Here are some additional tips on setting up an Apple Qmaster “render farm.”
By default, Apple Qmaster enables one rendering service per core. On a dual-core system, you will have two rendering services enabled by default. So that means out of the box, two copies of Shake will be running at the same time on a dual-core system. It may be necessary to disable a rendering service. For more information on changing the number of rendering services, see the “Apple Qmaster and Distributed Processing” chapter in the Compressor User Manual, available in Compressor Help.
Note: If you are using Shake, you can always change the number of processors Shake uses at submission time by using -cpus x, where x is the number of threads to use.
All the nodes in the cluster must have a common volume to work from; otherwise they will not know where to find assets needed for any given batch. There are many ways to set up file sharing. For more information, see the Mac OS X documentation on file sharing and the Mac OS X Server documentation.
You can set up a dedicated NFS server. For more information, see the Mac OS X Server documentation.
It may be necessary to relink your assets once you move your project to the shared volume. This varies depending on the types of files, plug-ins, fonts, and environmental requirements. Things that commonly need to be changed are the FileIn and FileOut paths, and env variables such as NR_INCLUDE_PATH and NR_FONT_PATH. UNC should be disabled, as these paths are typically not resolvable to nodes in the cluster when arbitrary host names are used.
Go to: ~/nreal/include/startup
Create a file called: qmaster.h
Add the following:
Press Return several times after the last line.
Save your work.