Enrol your own build and render machine

On our servers an organisation gets 5 media jobs a day (renders, videos, papers and manuals), one at a time, each with up to 50 MB of input. When they are used up you see “Render limit reached. Enrol your own machine to render without limits.” Builds of your designs always run on your own machine: we do not run an organisation’s own scripts on our servers.

A small program that runs on your machine as its own user, wbsim, which has no password and no sudo. It connects out to the platform; nothing connects in, so it needs no open port and no SSH. It makes its own key when it is enrolled, and it checks every job before doing anything: signed by the platform, meant for this machine, not expired, and never run before.

1. In CAD Studio’s Libraries window, choose Machines, then Install our agent. People with the IT setup or IT approver role can manage machines; whoever creates the organisation has IT setup.
2. Give the machine a name and choose Get a code. The code works once, for 15 minutes.
3. On the machine, run the command shown, as root. It looks like:

   curl -fsSL https://<platform>/api/simulators/agent/releases/install.sh | sudo sh -s -- --code ABCD-EFGH --platform https://<platform>

The machine needs Linux with systemd, on x86-64 or ARM64. The script creates the wbsim user, downloads the agent and checks it against its published checksum, starts it as a service and enrols it with the code. Root is not used after that.

1. The machine appears in Machines. Choose Approve.
2. On the machine’s row choose Switch builds on. If your organisation has two-person approval on, this must be done by someone other than the person who enrolled the machine.
3. Then choose Install the CAD toolchain on the same row.
4. Now build: in the Libraries window, open a library and choose Build.

The machine shows as offline when it has not been heard from for two minutes. Revoke the agent in Machines stops it taking jobs.

• CAD Studio builds: the jobs a design declares in its cad-studio.build.json. The machine gets the files of one commit (no clone, no history), runs the job, uploads the declared results and deletes its working folder.
• Renders and other media jobs: coming soon, without the daily limit.
• The Robot Studio physics engine (Python), with controllers and boards in the loop: coming soon.

Every build runs in its own capped unit, so a runaway job stops itself, not the machine:

• Memory: what the job asks for, 1 to 16 GB (2 GB if it does not say), with no swap.
• CPU: 1 to 8 cores (2 if it does not say).
• Time: 1 to 240 minutes (30 if it does not say).
• At most 256 processes and threads.
• Low CPU and disk priority, and a clean environment.