The TractorScheduler node's parameter “Shared File Root Path” for “UNC (Windows)” should take a UNC path, like “\\ourserver\ourmount\ourdir”, as the base path for the Working Directory when executing in a Windows context. However, it appears (at least in 17.5.460) that you are required to enter this with doubled backslashes, “\\\\ourserver\\ourmount\\ourdir” , as if you were writing a Python string constant or something. Without the escaped backslashes, the working directory and its contents aren't created, and while the Tractor job is created on our (Linux) farm, and the submitting Houdini doesn't give any visible indication of a problem, the farm job immediately fails because it has nothing to work with in its main task.

I'm not quite sure how you would be using the parameter where the escaping would be necessary, unless it is being fed directly into some sort of code-generation process, but it is very unfriendly to expect user-level UNC entry to require this sort of escaping…

I'll submit this as a bug report, but I thought this might help others if they run across this as well.