Pieces of the Arsenal Puzzle

[Nathan Rusch]

Alright, so now that I've got some pieces of Arsenal built, I'm
curious how the whole system fits together.

Can anyone give me a rundown of all the apps I just built (or that get
built at all), what their purposes are, and where/when/how they're
meant to run?

This is something that has been a mystery to me since I started
attacking this build, and I would love to have a good overview of the
system as I start trying to test it.

Thanks,

-Nathan

[Barry Robison]

Hi Nathan,

Sorry for the delayed response, been a bit swamped this week.

There is this page on the Wiki which explains a bit about the different server processes and what they do.

http://code.google.com/p/arsenalsuite/wiki/ServerProcesses

There is this diagram which is a pretty high level view of the pieces

http://code.google.com/p/arsenalsuite/wiki/OverviewDiagram


The main gist of it is:

Freezer - view and manage jobs in the queue
Burner - daemon on render nodes that runs the jobs ( either through C++ or a Python plug-in )
absubmit - submit jobs either via command line or Python
manager / verifier / reaper - Python processes you run on the "farm server"

All these different pieces are just different database clients doing their bit to insert or update records to maintain the state of "the farm".

Hope this helps, please do let me know any specific questions as it can be easy to overlook things which by now are obvious to me!

[Nathan Rusch]

Thanks for getting back to me Barry, and no worries about the delay.
Been pretty swamped myself.

I had looked at those Wiki pages in the past, but I didn't really
understand where Reaper, Manager, and Reclaimer were located in the
source files. However, after reading your reply more closely (namely
the part about them being "Python processes"), I did find them in the
python/scripts directory, so thanks for your patience on that one.

I am still a little curious what some of the other source folders in
cpp/apps are for (bach, blurDlx, remap, rfm, rfs, rjd, rum, rumnotify,
snafu). Are those non-critical apps you or Blur use in-house?

Thanks

[insti...@googlemail.com]

Mind you i am not an expert. Just throwing some bits and pieces.

blurdlx is blur's maxscript extensions. I assume it is used by the max
submitter

unsure:

RUM is the Resin update manager, which is a daemon updating Resin (the
internal asset tracking if i am not mistaken. Don't really know tho)
rumnotify is a local client notifying of updates in Resin
(i think the r* tools are all resin related)
rjd is the jabber daemon i think
rnd the notify daemon
rfs, i don't know but i think it is related to automatic EDL
generation/edit updating publishing as per the resin architecture
slides

remap: i think it allows mapping shares as local drives (windows)

snafu might be some webfrontend from the looks of the code. Never
investigated further

Sorry for the blurry info, but might give a bit of a headstart till
someone knowing
what he talks about comes along :)

[Matthew Newell]

On Mon, Aug 8, 2011 at 2:55 PM, insti...@googlemail.com <insti...@googlemail.com> wrote:

Mind you i am not an expert. Just throwing some bits and pieces.

blurdlx is blur's maxscript extensions. I assume it is used by the max
submitter

Correct, but not used by the max submitter, which still uses absubmit.exe cmd line(at blur anyway).  I doubt this is up to date, the 3dsmax related stuff is released elsewhere, so this could probably be removed unless someone is using it from here.
 

unsure:

RUM is the Resin update manager, which is a daemon updating Resin (the
internal asset tracking if i am not mistaken. Don't really know tho)

Right, it's a a daemon for distributing updates between clients.  It's defunct and hasn't been used for years.
 

rumnotify is a local client notifying of updates in Resin
(i think the r* tools are all resin related)
rjd is the jabber daemon i think
rnd the notify daemon
rfs, i don't know but i think it is related to automatic EDL
generation/edit updating publishing as per the resin architecture
slides

None of those are used anymore either and should probably be removed from the repository to reduce confusion, or moved to another directory where it's more obvious they aren't needed.

remap: i think it allows mapping shares as local drives (windows)

This should probably be moved.  It's just a simple utility for testing windows drive mapping functions.
 

snafu might be some webfrontend from the looks of the code. Never
investigated further

Barry wrote this one, i'll defer to him for explanation.

Matt