Here is another little tip for those of you using the Backburner Server as a service. Besides, the Win 7 machines boot 4 times as fast. All this delayed function does is delays the startup of the service until all the normal system services and functions are started. All of our Win 7 machines are ALWAYS up and available immediately after reboot.
Like the services in XP, you have Automatic, Manual and Disabled, but with Win 7 (and Vista) you now have Automatic AND Automatic (Delayed Start) in addition to Manual and Disabled. Once we upgraded our farm machines to Win 7, all this went away due to a nifty function available to services called Automatic (Delayed Start). I have created a simple batch script to “flush” those machines and bring them online. It defaults to Automatic, but I have noticed that most of our XP machines rarely show up in the Monitor after rebooting. In Win XP, the service can be set to start automatically, manually or disabled.
Then just save and close and restart the service. If restarting server as a service, you will need to stop it again, open the newly generated backburner.xml and edit the field indicating the name of the Backburner Manager. The best thing to do is stop the Backburner server app/service, delete the backburner/xml file located in the various locations listed above and then restart the app/service.
If you have 2 Ethernet ports on your workstation/server and plan on teaming them together into a single port using the teaming function in Windows (or your Ethernet manufacturer’s driver), this will automatically create a new MAC address. Here is another issue that has crept up on us once we moved to teaming our Ethernet ports and is directly related to the MAC address mentioned above. While this can be inconvenient when imaging and replicating machines, it definitely helps the manager find the Backburner servers faster and more efficiently. PiXeL_MoNKeY on at 21:37 - instead of deleting the backburner.xml edit it so the server mac tag is empty (the line then looks like ) and then create the machine image, that way all the other settings are preserved.
Mark Kauffman on at 16:45, #2 - when you run backburner as a service on Windows 7 make sure you select 'Automatic (Delayed Start)' instead of Automatic to make sure that when the machine reboots all required Windows components are loaded before the service is started,.
User contributed tips (thanks for adding these! They're summarized, see the comments on this post for the full text): Or you could simply remove all backburner.xml files from the system. Note that if you run Bacburner as a service you need to make sure you use the username that is configured for that service, not the user name you're logged in as.
When you set up a Bacburner render farm or add additional machines you find that only one of the (new) machines is visible in the Backburner Manager.