DR Issue - local machine can't find slaves

[Fluid_Jamie]

Hi,

I'm having a bit of a nightmare with DR and have searched through so many other threads to find a solution.

DR has suddenly stopped working on my workstation after being fine - the ONLY thing that has changed is my PC ninja-updating me to windows 11.

Search LAN and manually adding IPs doesn't fine the DR nodes.
Other machines on the network pick up the DR nodes fine.
Correct sockets are open on the firewall
I can ping the IPs of the nodes through my PC and the same to my PC on the nodes.
My PC, DR nodes and other workstations are running the same versions of Max and Corona - nothing has changed with this.

We have two networks connected to our workstations - one 192.xxx IP for general internet connectivity and a second 169.xxx IP for our render nodes and file servers (to protect the main agency network from heavy file traffic). This has never been an issue in the past though and works fine on the 4 other workstations.

I can submit files to the farm for render but at this stage of the project, local DR is much more efficient for quality-control at full res.

Any support would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Jamie

[Avi]

You might be experiencing some network IP/DNS auto resolving issue.

The solution could be to add IP address of node workstation in the main workstation host file that is located in this location: "C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts"

and then do the same thing in the node system as well. Add ip address and name of the workstation in the hostfile as well.

To get the hostname of your PC, you can use "whoami" command in the CMD and to get the IP address of your pc, you can use the "ipconfig" command and look for the IPV4 address.

I would advise you to consult your network engineer to do this for you and diagnose any network related issue in your PC.

You can also do some basic ping tests from both pc to see if they can communicate with each other or not.

You can also try some of these general troubleshooting steps to see if they help you:

1.Are you using some VPN software? If so, please stop using it and make sure you are using BB/DR on a "classic" local network.
2.Disable any antivirus software you are using on all PCs (including Windows Defender and Firewall) - this is just to check if the issue is related to this software. You can then turn it back on.
3.Add custom inbound/outbound rules in Windows Firewall - See this guide
4.Do not mix Corona's DR and Backburner. Use only one or the other.
5.Make sure on each computer there is only one instance of 3ds Max, DR server, Backburner. If there are multiple instances running at the same time (for example two 3dsmax.exe processes), some issues may appear.
6.Do not render from a perspective view—use some kind of camera, preferably a Corona Camera.
7.Open your scene, go to Render Setup, deselect the "lock" icon in the top right corner. Click on any viewport, then click on the viewport you want to render. Select the "lock" icon in Render Setup again. Such a reset of the rendered view sometimes helps.
8.Disable IPv6 - https://medium.com/@JockDaRock/disabling-ipv6-on-network-adapter-windows-10-5fad010bca75
9.Go to Windows’ Services list and make sure "Function Discovery Provider Host" and "Function Discovery Resource Publication" are started. Set them to automatic start.
10.Make sure you have network discovery enabled - https://www.isunshare.com/windows-10/turn-on-or-off-network-discovery-in-windows-10.html
11.Make sure you are using exactly the same 3ds Max version on all of the computers taking part in the distributed rendering (note: even using different update/hotfix versions may cause problems, for example, 3ds Max 2020.3 vs 2020.2).