Unfortunately they all boot from the same image, I could create 20 different images and assign a different one to each box, PXE linux can be configured to do this. The storage isn't a problem but it's not ideal to have twenty CD images lying around where the only difference is the few bytes that make up the hostname, hard to maintain at best. I think I need to remaster the image so that it can dynamically assign a hostname based on the MAC address.

Something like this would be good http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=115505 . The problem is that the method described there requires the network interface to be bought up and down during the boot process, that could get messy on the diskless nodes. I guess I'll just try it, see what happens, and work from there. The earliest I'm going to be able to do this is the weekend. I'll take advantage to make a few other changes I want to make to the image as well.

The BOINC clients do not come from the shared image. I'll do some Googling on Deep Freeze.

The clients all have a data path of /mnt/small/BOINC BUT this is a mount point and is really a different location for each machine. I'll find out about adding that line to the cc_config, that would be useful :)

So, the machine that was running seti while no other machines were has reported results and has been assigned credit/pending credit.

I think the project is getting confused because the machines all have the same user (me), the same public IP (not sure they account for that), the same hardware, the same hostname and, I noticed last night, the same apparent local IP.

On all of my other machines, when I go to the "show IP" link on the project pages it reports the IP to be "192.168.whatever", on all these machines that give me issues the local IP is reported as "127.0.0.1". Any idea on that one?

I might be able to do a temporary fix for the non-unique hostnames tonight, I'll leave them going for 24hours after that and see what happens. If it seems to fix it then I'll look at a more permanent solution. My gut is now telling me that its because of the host names being the same and the project thinking that its the same machine but reporting with a different hostId and so is erroneously dropping the units for the previous hostId.

Hey, Dagorath, thanks. I'll check that out, I have to maintain the primary use for these machines though which is not BOINC related.

There is good news however, I have just set two of the machines going on new seti units and I have manually given them different hostnames, even before returning results they are showing as different machines in my computer list on the seti account pages whereas before it was only showing one machine with the hostname 'Knoppix'

It looks like duplicate hostnames was the issue, I'll file a bug report against this in due time as I think you might legitimately have more than one machine with the same hostname (you probably shouldnt do this on the same network like I did but they might be in different subnets/buildings and boinc wouldn't know about it)

It was definitely the hostnames being identical that was the issue, the two machines I gave unique names to have now both reported units and and credit is either awarded or pending.

Wooo!

Thanks for your help everyone :)