Temerity: Tutorials - Starting and Stopping Pipeline

Tutorial: Starting and Stopping Pipeline

The following tutorials will walk you through the steps needed to get Temerity Pipeline up and running for the first time at your facility. This tutorial covers starting up and shutting down the various types of server daemons which provide the core functionality of Pipeline and launching the graphical client for the first time.

Starting the Server Daemons

Once you've downloaded the software and unpacked the RPMs by executing the downloaded shell archive, you'll need to install the RPMs on the appropriate machines. See the Obtaining and Installing Pipeline section of the plconfig(1) docs for details. You'll need to start the Pipeline server daemons as the Pipeline Administrator user (see --pipeline-user). The daemons can be started in any order as long as all are started within a reasonable amount of time.

Start plpluginmgr(1) on the plugin manager host (see --plugin-host):

> plpluginmgr

The plugin manager is responsible for verifying and loading all Pipeline plugins and supplying all of the other Pipeline servers daemons and client programs with consistent copies of these plugins. Pipeline allows new plugins to be created and existing plugins to be modified and reloaded dynamically. The plugin manager centralizes this dynamic loading of plugins and insures that all Pipeline programs use identical versions of these plugins.

Start plqueuemgr(1) on the queue manager host (see --queue-host):

> plqueuemgr

The queue manager is responsible for monitoring the renderfarm and artist workstations which participate in the Pipeline queue and for dispatching jobs to these machines. It coordinates the activities of all job manager daemons and communicates with the master manager daemon to provide queue related status information to users.

Start plfilemgr(1) on the file manager host (see --file-host):

> plfilemgr

The file manager performs all low-level file system operations on behalf of the master manager daemon such as copying/removing files, building checksums and creating symbolic links.

Start plmaster(1) on the master manager host (see --master-host):

> plmaster --rebuild

The master manager coordinates the activity of all Pipeline server daemons and performs all Pipeline operations on behalf of the client programs. The master daemon also maintains all Pipeline databases and manages the persistent storage of these databases on disk.

Alternatively, the file manager can be run as a thread of the master manager daemon on the master manager host like so:

> plmaster --file-mgr --rebuild

The --rebuild option is only needed the first time you start the server or after a hard shutdown. This rebuilds database caches Pipeline uses to speed server startup time.

You'll also want to start job manager daemons on all hosts that will execute jobs for the Pipeline queue. Job manager daemons can be added or removed at any time, so you probably just want to start a few a first to test your installation. Once you have everything working properly, you can start job managers daemons for the entire renderfarm and/or artist workstations. You can start job managers on each host like so:

> pljobmgr

The first time you start the Pipeline server daemons, you'll probably want to run them interactively from shell so you can monitor the output more easily. Each daemon will report on establishing network connections to the other daemons, while performing initialization and when they are ready to begin processing requests from the client programs. Each daemon provides a fine degree of control over these messages using the --log option. When running the daemons in the background as a system service the --log-file or --standard-log-file options can be used to direct all logging output to rotating log files instead.

Starting the Graphical Client

Once the server daemons have reported that they are ready, you can start the Pipeline's graphical client application plui(1). The first time you start plui(1), you'll want to run it as the Pipeline Administrator user. This user has access to administrative functionality you will need to finish setting up Pipeline which is disabled for normal users. You can start the graphical client on any machine by:

> plui

A splash screen will be displayed while plui(1) loads textures and other resource data files. This should take about a minute.

The first time plui(1) is started and it has finished loading its resources, an error dialog will be displayed which looks like this:

This is normal. Before you can start using Pipeline to create nodes and do useful work, you'll need to create toolset packages and a default toolset for the software installed at your site. This is covered in the next tutorial: Creating a Default Toolset. For now, just press the "Close" button. You should then see the main window for plui(1) containing a single empty panel.

Shutting Down the Server Daemons

As the Pipeline Administrator user, you can shutdown all of the Pipeline server daemons using the command-line scripting client program plscript(1):

> plscript admin --shutdown --shutdown-jobmgrs --shutdown-pluginmgr

You can also shutdown Pipeline using the (Main Menu > Admin > Shutdown Server) popup menu item of plui(1) if run as the Pipeline Administrator. You should always use one of these two methods to shutdown Pipeline and never simply kill the server daemons. Although Pipeline is designed to be tolerant of hard shutdowns caused by catastrophic failures such as power outages or OS crashes, you may cause some minor data loss by interrupting lengthy operations before they can complete. You will also be forced to use the --rebuild option when restarting plmaster(1) which may take a while for large node databases.

Next Tutorial: Creating a Default Toolset