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Alfred — Work Distribution System

1 Alfred - Overview & Concepts

The Big Picture

Important Concepts

2 Monitor - The User Interface

Alfred Job Status

Job Queue Window

Job Queue Menubar

The Huntgroup - Servers Available

Per-Job Controls

Job Detail Window - Internal Job Structure

Task Status Information

Output from Launched Processes

Inside a Task - Command Details

Chaser Commands - Frame Preview

Other Task Window Controls

Useful Shortcuts

The "Watch-Servers" Maitre-d Status Dialog

The Preferences Dialog

3 Manual page

4 Dispatching

Idea of a Hierarchical Job

Depth-First Traversal & Evaluation

Dispatching Schemes

Process Launch & Tracking

Command Errors & Blocking

Deleting Jobs & the Dispatcher Lifetime

5 Scheduling - Managing Servers & User Access

Making Remote Servers Available to Alfred

Saving the New Server Definitions

Filtering the Host List

Temporarily Offline Servers

Advanced Scheduling Topics

Group Hierarchies

Viewing and editing the master schedule

Crews: Users + Servers + Times

Limits and Tags

Server Ping Commands

6 The Maitre-d: Operation & Components

The Master Schedule File

Responding to Dispatcher Requests

Service Type Search

HTTP connections

7 NIMBY - Not In My Back Yard

Ejecting in-progress tasks

The Desktop Environment and NIMBY

Note about Screen-Savers

8 Scripting - Alfred Language Summary

A simple example

Process Launch and Tracking

Remote Servers, Launch Expressions, and Runtime Substitution

Sharing One Server Check-Out

Special Characters and Escapes

Shell Pipelines and other Expressions

Assign: Initializing Global Job Variables

Using Iterate to Simplify Repetitive Scripts

On-Demand Processing, Walk-Ahead Limits, and Thwarting

Formatting During Substition and Leading Zero Padding

Iterate Nodes and Job Percent-Done

Conditional Cmd Launches using if Expressions

Referencing results from previous commands

Progress or percent-done indication

9 Configuration

Configuring for Basic Operation

Configuring Servers and the Maitre-d for Remote Rendering

Start the Remote NetRenderMan Servers

Choose, and initialize, a Maitre-d Host

Add the Remote Servers to the Alfred Schedule

Enabling HTTP Access to Alfred

To enable wrangler mode

Authentication using HTTP cookies

Fallback Maitre-d Servers

Restart On Reboot: init.d/rc2 scripts

Customizing Dialog Messages

Network Name Service Basics

Start with /etc/hosts

Where does DNS / BIND fit in?

A typical small studio configuration

Edit /etc/resolv.conf

Edit /etc/nsswitch.conf

Configure the other systems

Test the hostname look-up service

10 Alfserver

Specifying Alfserver Options

Selecting Among Multiple Renderers

Temporarily Disabling Server Slots

11 Metrics

Built-in Metrics

Large Site Considerations

12 BatCave

Entering the BatCave

Database Details

Alfred^TM