Hey all - really cool news. I just received word from our resident build guru Gekko that we've succesfully rolled out the new Blender 2.53 Beta clients for BOINC for all platforms (32bit and 64bit Mac OSX, Linux and Windows).

The new builds have some bug fixes and naturally feature the latest version of the Blender render engine with all it's tweaks.
 

Renderfarm.fi uploader now GPL licensed: in Blender 2.53 Beta!

I also decided to take this opportunity to point out to anybody who's missed this so far: you are no longer tied to our own distribution of Blender in order to use Renderfarm.fi. You can now just download your favourite main branch Blender 2.53 Beta build and enable the Renderfarm.fi add-on in order to use the service directly from within your Blender.

Naturally this represents a huge leap for us in terms of availability, hopefully meaning many more Blenderheads can now find their way on to the service. You can read more about the script from the official Blender 2.53 Wiki. Cheers!

I'm excited to announce that we're back up and things are as they were before the storm that struck us on the eve of Assembly 2010. The issues with the email sending have been solved and the web front-end is moving forwards. All this in mind, I'd like to welcome all the new users that have been waiting at the shore for the past two weeks (we're working on a solution to send an invitation mail to all who registered during this time right now).

As we move out of the low waters, I'd now like to invite you all to discuss about the future features of Renderfarm.fi. An example of an ongoing development discussion is the idea of using a video hosting service such as Youtube or Vimeo to host the encoded videos. What do you think about this topic?

Although many of you have probably noticed this already (either from reading my personal blog entry from last night or then by wondering on to the Server Status page), we're back in action. Our back-end is receiving and distributing work units as per normal, even while the web frontend will require some more work to get to the state where it was before the crash.

However, there's an important note to all new registrants: the server is currently not sending in your validation email. We know of this and will send your emails to you after the weekend. Thank you for your patience!

I'm going to meet up with the ISP Otaverkko during the week to get us more diskspace and a good back-up plan for the future. So this episode will hopefully not repeat itself anymore in the future. Meanwhile, I'd like to thank the dynamic duo of Janus Kristensen (BURP guru) and Olivier Romand (Renderfarm.fi main developer) for their hard work. A big cheers also to Otaverkko, where we had to visit twice - both times after hours (great service policy I tell you).

Renderfarm.fi

From the left: Janus Kristensen, Olivier Romand, Tuomo Karhapää (Otaverkko)
in front of the Otaverkko main offices in Espoo, Finland