Update: as of Mac OS sierra apple has broken this thanks to Cook and his efforts to destroy the apple mac os product

Just finished getting HQueue up on Mac OS. The main advice is start with a fresh install of HQueue. If you have been running Houdini for a while and just saw all those pesky HQueue browsers pop up during the install process (since you checked hqueue install) you should scrape every bit of HQueue out of the machine and then reinstall it. If you don't do that you increase your chances of HQueue bizarre errors and failure to function. Part of the “hqueueectomy” process is described in the HQueue documentation (the client side) but you will need to go deeper than the documentation to completely remove HQueue server since Houdini uninstall doesn't.

Once you scraped HQueue from the machine do a fresh install of Houdini including Hqueue. Then setup MacOs sharing and remote login according to the HQueue documentation and it should work. If you get Mantra permission errors when it is trying to render to your render folder check the HQclient group folder permissions. The main point is install HQueue after a complete hqueueectomy.

Once HQueue is working leave it alone. I suggest not checking the install HQueue box during a daily build Houdini installation unless you need to update it (check Houdini change logs to see if SESI messed with HQueue) and uncheck the box to create the shared drive.

BEWARE - Mac OS And HQueue Major Post Update - BEWARE

One last and important point to do with Apple Mac Os. Apple decided to disable auto mounting in the mount point folder /Volumes. Perhaps there was a corporate decision that there are nefarious Pokemon Go loitering in /Volumes, who can say. The point is you can't use it as a mount point for HQueue, it may appear to work fine during installation but when Apple Mac Os finds out what you have done it disables the HQueue /Volumes mount point. Now what you have to do is create an alternate mount point. I created a folder called /hqmnt using the command sudo mkdir /hqmnt so I know it is associated with HQueue. Next you have to change three files. First, change the shared folder mount point in hqserver.ini from /Volumes to /hqmnt. Second, you need to edit the two Mac OS operating system files in /etc called auto_hqshared and auto_hqshared_localhost and change the /Volumes parameter to /hqmnt as you did in hqserver.ini. Now issue the command sudo automount -vc and restart the HQueue server and client daemons or just reboot the machine. I posted this as a Mac Os change to SESI since the default with HQueue on Mac OS is /Volumes and it will never work.

Another point to note is that if you want to upgrade to a new version of HQueue you can not uncheck the box to create a shared network drive during the installation. even though this is an option during HQueue installation. Unchecking the box to create a shared network drive also unchecks the box to upgrade HQueue. This results to destruction and overwriting of the correctly working automount files in /etc (auto_master has lines of indefinite nonsense added with each upgrade and auto_hqshared in particular is destroyed and needs to be either renamed to prevent this or re-implemented entirely).

Make certain to set the hq_render advanced tab to specify Batch all frames in one job and set the maxium CPUs available per job or your render performance will suffer enormously. When I first tested HQueue performance, without setting this tab, performance was two orders of magnitude slower than without HQueue. The hq_render node advanced tab is the basis for HQueue performance.

This is my experience, your mileage may vary.

Hello Lars, interesting post… I'm kind of losing my hair setting up Hqueue… I has several problems with my last install so I decided removing houdini from both the sever and the client…
now staring with a fresh install, when houdini finishes installation I have a window opening saying internal server error. When I try to open the hqueue console (http://localhost:5000/dashboard) it says internal error too.
I suspect that some bits of hqserver may remain on the drive even though I deleted the hqserver and hqclients fodlers on both machines and the sidefx files in launchdaemon…
do you have some advices to sort me out of this nightmare?
Another thing, when i install from scratch houdini+hqueue it doesn't ask me for setting up the hq server as it should do. maybe the last houdini versions don't ask it anymore??

Thanks