---THE PROBLEM---
I was unable to use Mental Ray Satellite to network render. Kept getting something like:
mi-ray/tcp: not a service (check %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\services)
Many people have solved this problem by addressing things like this:
1. your firewall (try disabling it)
2. your antivirus software (try disabling it)
3. mixed versions of mental ray across your network (which is asking for trouble)
(By all means, check these things first.) But my setup was 100% correct! (verified by Autodesk support)
---THE ANSWER---
The cause was not my setup, it was my SCENE!
Long story short, there were references to missing textures in my scene, and this was causing the mr satellite server processes on my slaves to HANG!
---THE MORAL---
If you're having trouble network rendering, make sure your scene is up to snuff with no dangling references or other types of errors. Your local renders may tolerate things like this, but a network render may not! That was the case for me.
If you're in the habit of ignoring maya's little warnings and/or errors because your scene still "works", be warned - you may run into anomalous behavior later on. Keep an eye on your console output and address warnings as they arise.
---DETAILS (if you're interested)---
How did I get bad references in my scene? By using free 3D models that I downloaded off the internet. Be careful when you do this, because often these models will want to use textures that didn't come bundled with them. Even if you assign your own textures to them, maya may still complain about some weird missing texture.
To fix this, I opened my scene (in .ma format) in a text editor and commented out the lines that referenced the bogus textures. In my case, I had to do a couple of these:
createNode file -n "door15:file1";
setAttr ".co" -type "float3" 0.20354 0.20354 0.20354 ;
// setAttr ".ftn" -type "string" "E:/??/??/Turbosquid/interior scene//Textures/WOOD01.JPG";
The "E:/??/??/Turbosquid/interior scene//Textures/WOOD01.JPG" was breaking things. Commenting-out the line(s) fixed it.
Hope this helps someone someday!
