Some more notes about this:
- Having no popups is only a side effect (for me) although it´s pretty handy when people here fooling around with photoshop do not even notice that their box is frequently captured for rendering :) But most of our DR servers are dedicated anyway.
- When running DrServer as service it gets quite fail save (power loss, reboots if by accident automatic windows updates are enabled, possibly other users working at a node/ws and so on) because it is automatically restarted when a reboot occurs and any logged in users have absolutely no influence. This is equally or even more important for the LicensingServer (which I also run as service for this reason).
- A windows service is easily remotely controllable. You can do this with standard windows GUI tools or by script. So a manual deploy even of dailies which come as installer is a matter of seconds to deploy for me: extract to a directory, run script, wait 1 minute, done. (screenshot: script updating render nodes). I would never update/test dailies such frequently if I hadn't this option.
Implementing drServer.exe and LicensingServer.exe as windows service should appear on the agenda in the long term imho.
Good Luck
« Last Edit: 2016-04-25, 12:19:52 by Frood »
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