While looking for an answer to my previous 3dsMax problem, I came across a lightly-documented tool called the “BackBurner Web Monitor”. 

It’s not talked about much, but it’s basically a CGI tool that can duplicate all of the monitor’s functionality through a Web Page.  From the WebPage you can view jobs, view servers, suspend and restart jobs, and more.  It’s a great tool because all of the communication with the Manager is done from a single system, the Web Server.  Of course, they won’t let us run a webserver here (Be it Apache or IIS) so we’ve been unable to use it.  This means we have 3 or 4 people all running a monitor individually, which puts a huge load on the manager (Especially once you top the 1000 jobs mark).

I took it upon myself to dig into this deeper and came up with a neat solution.  Being a CGI program, it simply takes arguments via a HTTP GET, and spews out an HTML webpage to relay to the user.  So why can’t I emulate this behavior, and then copy the resulting HTML file to our fileserver, for all of us to view?  A few hours later, and after researching how to pass GET parameters, I had a prototype in Tcl working.  With a bit more work, I even had it postprocessing the HTML files to remove links (that no longer work), correct paths to correctly resolve to the Stylesheets and images, and disabling the buttons (since they no longer work).  I even went so far as to completely scrape and rebuild the Servers listing page so that it’s in a basic table format.

Sure, the result is read-only, but that’s 90% of what we need.  I have a TCL Script that I can run to update the pages every 30 seconds on the fileserver, and the HTML documents have META Refresh tags to refresh every 30 seconds.  This way we can each simply open the job listing and leave it running to see how the renderings progress.  It puts basically no load on the manager, and lets everyone stay updated on what’s going on.  It’s been a big hit, and I’m curious if such a thing would be useful to others.  I’m sure I’ll add a few more bells and whistles to it, but it’s working great for us right now.

Post a comment or drop me an email if you’re interested.
[tag:3dsmax][tag:autodesk][tag:backburner][tag:webpage][tag:cgi][tag:tcl]

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