Lots of small victories; but the war is still to be won.

I've finished case modding and it looks pretty good if I say so myself (pictures to follow). This take on this whole thing has required me to make a lot of changes to the basic Helmer cabinet: I've cut four circles into the front of the case for my fans and attached the front panel using fan grills; I've etched Render Farm onto the front panel in large font just in case there was any doubt about the purpose of the machine (I did both of those jobs with my Dremel); I've perforated the blender logo into the with my Bosch hammer drill (which was harder work than I'd imagined); I've taken all the runners out and cut a segment out of each left hand runner for the patch cables and then covered the runners in electrical insulation tape before re-inserting them to prevent the cabinet becoming charged; I've taken one of the draws and cut it down so it fits the inside bottom of the case; I've taken the backs of each draw out and bent down one edge so that I can use them as a shelf for my PSU and hard-drive; I've taken some audio cable and using a little insulation tape fashioned a two holed female connector on one end and a cable switch for each motherboard on the other; and finally I've chopped up an second drawer made some support bars for the motherboards which I've also covered in insulation tape (5 rolls of insulation tape for a pound).

I've also made a lot of progress with the software side of the build. Setting up the network is of itself fairly easy. Knowing what to do is very hard. Finding any decent instructions is tricky as most of the tutorials I've found deal with aspects of networking I'm not interested in (such as making your own DNS, Router, SAN or setting up Wifi networks). So after much trawling of the internet and many failed attempts to set all the various addresses I finally found a simple system that so far works. I've used the built in network manager to set up the wired network; turned on the in-built VCN client for remote desktop viewing which allows me to view the desktop on a machine without a monitor (it also quite importantly allows me to shutdown the computer remotely); installed SSH, SFTP and SCP for file transfer; and install NFS and SAMBA for file sharing. I've also written myself a set of instructions (see below) for setting this up.
The big problem I've got at the moment is that I've not managed to get DrQueue up and running. I installed a .deb onto my main computer successfully; but all that achieved was to install an older version of Blender. So setting up DrQueue is the next big challenge.


Setup Steps

• On the master machine add the IP address and host name into the host file.
• Add the host name to the list of allowed hosts in firestarter.
  ∘ 127.0.1.1           Node1
  ∘ 192.168.3.90     Nettop
• On the host machine
• Using the network manager edit the wired connection.
  ∘ Make IPv4 manual
  ∘ Add a new address entry
    ‣ i.e. 192.168.3.94
• Open a terminal and ping the master machine
  ∘ ping Nettop
• Set up the VNC server
  ∘ Open 'Desktop Sharing Preferences'
    ‣ Select 'Allow other users to view your desktop'
    ‣ Un-select all security options
    ‣ Set notification to 'never'
• Test VNC server
• Disconnect the network and do the following installs:
  ∘ sudo apt-get install openssh-server  {to install open ssh}
  ∘ sudo apt-get install synaptic
  ∘ sudo apt-get install gnome-system-tools
• Test SSH/SFTP connection
• In terminal type "shares-admin"
  ∘ Install samba and nfs
  ∘ install sharing software
• Apply all updates.
• Disable power saving/screen saver