In a recent case, a customer getting a endless repetition of this error message when he used satellite rendering:

// ERROR : MSG  0.n  error  011326: bad message received from host 1, 0xbad0bad
// ERROR : MSG  0.n  error  011326: bad message received from host 1, 0xbad0bad
// ERROR : MSG  0.n  error  011326: bad message received from host 1, 0xbad0bad
...

By itself, this message doesn’t tell us much more than that something bad happened and now the master and the slave aren’t communicating.

• MSG means this message is from the module that handles low-level message passing and thread management.
• 0.n identifies the machine where the error occured. Machine 0 is the client machine where the render was started. The dot (.) separates the machine (host) number from the thread number.
• Thread n is a special network communication thread that keeps contact with the satellilte machines if network parallelism is used.

Typically, the real error message is output just before all these bad message errors start. To catch this first error, we redirected the xsibatch output to a log file:

xsibatch.bat -render \\server\project\Scenes\test.scn" -verbose on > xsibatch.log

The initial error turned out to be a memory access error. More on that later.