Workstation System Maintenance ​

How to Update Build Server & Clients ​

To update Client Workstations; the Build Server will pull all of the latest changes from the main gentoo repository and compile a system update. When done, it will ask if you want to push out the compiled changes to the clients. The clients ask for updates to be pushed from the build server every five minutes. If the build server signals that there are updates, the clients will perform a sync, downloading the compiled packages from the build server and installing all updated packages.

  1. ssh user@build-server-addr connect to your build server via ssh
  2. Use su to Login as root or login as root directly
  3. cd to change directory to the root home folder
  4. Run ./update_build_server.sh

Update custom package recipes on Build Server ​

Some applications on Blender Studio workstations are not included in the main Gentoo repository and are instead sourced from an external repository. To learn more about how external repositories are used in Gentoo see the Gentoo Handbook. This is known as an overlay repository Blender Studio Overlay Repo. To update the recipe for an existing package in an overlay repo follow the steps below.

  1. Commit changes to the package recipes on the Blender Studio Overlay Repo
  2. ssh user@build-server-addr connect to your build server via ssh
  3. Update the package recipes on the Build Server emaint sync --repo blender-studio-overlay

Once an update of the recipe is complete any affected packages can be installed our updated by following the Installing Packages on Build Server guide.

Installing Packages on Build Server ​

Packages need to be compiled on the Build Server and marked with a date to be able to discovered by the workstations. Follow the below steps to install/update a package on the build server.

  1. ssh user@build-server-addr connect to your build server via ssh
  2. Use su to Login as root or login as root directly
  3. Run emerge --oneshot {package-name} to update a live package.
    • Run emerge --oneshot blender-studio-tools to update the studio Add-ons
  4. Run ~/signal_updates.sh to mark this update as the latest

Info

The command emerge --oneshot {package-name} compiles package, but does not add the packages to the @world, this means these packages will be removed when running --depclean.. We add this because these packages are already pulled in by another set. So we don’t want to add it again to the @world set. To learn more visit the Gentoo Handbook

Manually Update the Blender daily build ​

If you want to manually update the Blender daily build on the computers you:

  1. ssh user@build-server-addr connect to your build server via ssh
  2. Use su to Login as root or login as root directly
  3. Run emerge --oneshot blender-bin to download the current daily build from https://builder.blender.org/download/daily/.
  4. Run ~/signal_updates.sh to let the client computers know they should update

How to specify a specific daily build

If you want to deploy a specific daily build version from the daily archive (https://builder.blender.org/download/daily/archive/), then you can do the following:

  1. Get the URL for the .tar file you want to deploy.
  2. Assign the URL to the bash variable BLENDER_BIN_URL

For example: BLENDER_BIN_URL=https://url.to.the.blender-daily-build.tar.xz emerge -1 blender-bin

Update Local Add-Ons ​

Add-Ons are locally stored in the following directories; /usr/share/flamenco and /usr/share/blender_studio_tools. These are updated by running the following commands. These directories are automatically updated daily by the Gentoo package manager.

Note that the Flamenco package installs and updates the addon, manager, and worker per default.

bash
emerge -1 blender-studio-tools
emerge -1 flamenco
emerge -1 blender-studio-tools
emerge -1 flamenco

How to update to specific version? ​

In some cases, users may want to specify what version of an add-on to deploy. Users can accomplish this using eclass variables found in the Gentoo Devmanual.

  • Run EGIT_COMMIT=<hash> emerge {package-name} to update to a specific commit
  • Run EGIT_BRANCH=<branch> emerge {package-name} to update to a specific branch
  • Run EGIT_COMMIT=<hash> EGIT_BRANCH=<branch> emerge {package-name} to update to a specific commit with in a specific branch

Wake on LAN ​

Wake on LAN is used turn on computers from a "low power" or sleeping state so they can be updated. Wake on LAN uses the hardware information provided by the clients to immediately wake up all that are currently offline. The following guide covers how to parse the hardware info sent by client computers and to use that information to wake any sleeping computers via Wake on LAN.

Will Computers Turn Off after updating?

If this is used in combination with a system update, the client computers will turn off after the system update has completed. (Unless any users are logged into the system when the update finishes).

  1. ssh user@build-server-addr connect to your build server via ssh
  2. Use su to Login as root or login as root directly
  3. cd to change directory to the root home folder
  4. mkdir comps To create a folder to store parsed client hardware info if none exists
  5. parse_output.py /var/studio_scripts/hw_data/* comps/ to parse client hardware info
  6. Run ./wol_shared_comps.py comps/* to wake any computers that are asleep

(CC) Blender Foundation | studio.blender.org