Welcome to Workparty, written by Edward Cannon
feel free to use, change and improve but please give credit where credit is due

this software is very much alpha, please do make backups of everything and run behind a (good)
firewall. You have been warned.

Despite the above, this works pretty well for me, and I encourage everyone to try it out.
To use requires editing several files, but no real programing experence. The renderfarm
is designed to render animations--not single frames. All files are saved as png at the moment.

Setting up a server
You will need a server machine with python 2.5 or later installed. Start the webserver.py script found
in the master directory. This serves on port 80, so that should not be blocked or otherwise
in use (Linux users may need to run the script with elevated permissions). The user running the script 
should have sufficient privlege to write to the subdirectory upload, as well as the directory 
from which you are running the script. a file log.txt will contain a list of files uploaded, and 
the directory upload will contain these files.

Setting up a render node
Each node needs java (obviously) and python 2.5 or later installed. Copy your Art of Illusion install
directory into the node directory, renaming it as AOI (note the capitilazation). Edit the config file 
for each node and copy the whole node directory to the node machine. Run the node.py script on 
each node. After rendering, the script uploads all files in the render subdirectory to the master. 
The master is specified as a url (including the http://) in the top of the node.py file. Files are 
uploaded by http, so that should be allowed on your node and network.

As a backup against network errors, no rendered files are deleted from the render directory. Because the
node attemps to upload all files from the render directory to the server, this directory should be 
manually emptied between each render.

Users are encouraged to make suggustions and (helpfull) comments.
renderfarm (at) unicornschool (dot) org or find me on the friendlyskies aoi forum.
a test aoi file is included as an example.