TL;DR: Our 2-day server upgrade turned into 2 weeks.

“It’ll be simple,” he said. “We’ve done this a million times before,” they said. “We’ll get to take a weekend off,” we thought.

If life were only that simple.

We won’t bore you with too many details, but Murphy’s Law is alive and well. Between the air conditioning being on the fritz during some of the hottest days of the year; newly ordered parts not fitting; ordering replacements and waiting days at a time for them to arrive; and, failures in both hardware and software installations have added up to several long delays.

At ASUS’s prompting we started out trying to troubleshoot Windows 11. Next, we performed a system reinstall trying to preserve our data. Eventually, the suggestion was made to “nuke the entire site from orbit” and do a complete, fresh installation from scratch. Nothing helped. By the way, do you know how long it takes to reinstall all of a new system’s drivers and reload apps (36!), most of them requiring a reboot after each install, especially those for whom you’ve somehow lost the licensing information for?

Our mass storage solution, the one holds all of our source code and rendered images library, stopped working. The system’s cooling solution, doesn’t. At least, not well. Motherboard features that we paid an arm and a leg for refuse to work, no matter how much time we spent in the BIOS trying to set parameters that are barely documented, if at all. (ASUS, by the way.)

In an “adding insult to injury” sort of way, one of our essential tools, Iray Server, that we paid $300 for less than two months ago, is now free. We discovered this when we went to redownload the software and couldn’t figure out why we couldn’t setup our licensing information. Iray Server allows us to queue up Daz renders and let the server handle rendering chores, so we can immediately get back to building out scenes. So, if you’re a budding 3D asset creator, enjoy.

So, bottom line, the server is back up but with a severe limp. We don’t know when we might finish it (it’s currently in pieces both inside and outside of the case, held together with bubblegum and toothpicks)…

…but it’s sort of operational and we can get back to work for the time being. After a fashion. We’ll have to operate the video cards at less than peak efficiency until the cooling system gets sorted. Getting the server back to full operation is definitely a priority, but will have to wait for awhile so we don’t get too far behind.

We’re still tiptoeing around the server’s limitations, so not much has been accomplished as far as Confusion is concerned, but we still have a couple of renders to share.

All that being said, pray, feast your eyes upon the fruits of our recent labors, captured in these images. Rejoice!!