What does a "Communication deferred" status, followed by a countdown timer, mean in the "Projects" tab of BOINC?

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It means that boinc will wait that amount of time before attempting to contact the project server again. It's usually because there are no workunits to distribute to you at the moment. You can click the Update button to try again, but I think you can only use this button once every 10 minutes.

I've never seen such a long countdown time before; usually it's 24 hours.

Are you trying to get a workunit for your first boinc project? Which project?

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It is usually caused by multiple failures to make contact with a project server. I've seen this kind of extra long back off before when a server was down for several days. It occurs because the deferment is exponentially larger with each failed attempt.

I brought the matter up on the Dev mailing list a while back. I believe that future Boinc managers versions will be capping the deferment to 24 hrs.

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Boinc V 7.4.36
Win7 i5 3.33G 4GB NVidia 470

If John is trying to get a new climate prediction model, my announcement here

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=1228

explains why he can't at the moment and suggestions about what to do while he waits. I think that Carl, who's the chief programmer for cpdn in Oxford, must have set the countdown timer to its maximum value to give himself time to sort the problem with the server out. It happened during a boinc upgrade and led to 200K climate models, each of which needs 4+ months 24/7 to process on a fast machine, being handed out within a few minutes. There are now of course no models left to be given out.

One lady who I think is a newbie has 1731 climate models...... It's fortunate that the disk usage default says to leave a small % of the disk free for the member's personal use!

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Anyone with this problem about getting new climate models can look for help here

http://www.climateprediction.net/board/viewtopic.php?p=51263#51263 and
http://www.climateprediction.net/board/viewtopic.php?p=51250#51250

whether they're using the BBC version of boinc or standard boinc. You need to register separately for that forum if you want to post and it helps if you choose the same username so we recognise you.

BBC members can also post in the top thread here

http://bbc.cpdn.org/forum_forum.php?id=4

But the cpdn/boinc forum is down.

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I'm getting this error for the first time tonight. I just upgraded last night to BOINC 5.4.11, and tonight when I logged on, it began complaining that it can't get to the network:

< log snippet >

10/16/2006 7:06:43 PM||Starting BOINC client version 5.4.11 for windows_intelx86
10/16/2006 7:06:43 PM||libcurl/7.15.3 OpenSSL/0.9.8a zlib/1.2.3
10/16/2006 7:06:43 PM||Data directory: C:\\Program Files\\BOINC
10/16/2006 7:06:43 PM||Processor: 2 GenuineIntel Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.20GHz
10/16/2006 7:06:43 PM||Memory: 1022.09 MB physical, 2.40 GB virtual
10/16/2006 7:06:43 PM||Disk: 145.27 GB total, 123.02 GB free
10/16/2006 7:06:44 PM|rosetta@home|URL: http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/; Computer ID: 272841; location: home; project prefs: default
10/16/2006 7:06:44 PM||No general preferences found - using BOINC defaults
10/16/2006 7:06:44 PM||Local control only allowed
10/16/2006 7:06:44 PM||Listening on port 31416
10/16/2006 7:06:44 PM|rosetta@home|Resuming task 1ogw__BOINC_OLDRELAXFLAGS_ABRELAX_SAVE_ALL_OUT__1278_8285_0 using rosetta version 532
10/16/2006 7:06:47 PM|rosetta@home|Resuming task 1mkyA_BOINC_NEWRELAXFLAGS_ABRELAX_SAVE_ALL_OUT__1275_9623_0 using rosetta version 532
10/16/2006 8:25:00 PM|rosetta@home|Sending scheduler request to http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta_cgi/cgi
10/16/2006 8:25:00 PM|rosetta@home|Reason: To fetch work
10/16/2006 8:25:00 PM|rosetta@home|Requesting 6965 seconds of new work
10/16/2006 8:25:00 PM||Project communication failed: attempting access to reference site
10/16/2006 8:25:04 PM||Access to reference site failed - check network connection or proxy configuration.
10/16/2006 8:25:05 PM|rosetta@home|Scheduler request failed: couldn't resolve host name
10/16/2006 8:25:05 PM|rosetta@home|Deferring scheduler requests for 1 minutes and 0 seconds
10/16/2006 8:25:30 PM|rosetta@home|Sending scheduler request to http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta_cgi/cgi
10/16/2006 8:25:30 PM|rosetta@home|Reason: Requested by user
10/16/2006 8:25:30 PM|rosetta@home|Requesting 6944 seconds of new work
10/16/2006 8:25:36 PM|rosetta@home|Scheduler request failed: couldn't resolve host name
10/16/2006 8:25:36 PM|rosetta@home|Deferring scheduler requests for 1 minutes and 0 seconds

< end log snippet >

I can ping boinc.bakerlab.org from my PC; I ran a tracert and saw no problems and no delays longer than 50 ms. The Rosetta site doesn't say anything about down time. When I look at the "Advanced / Options", the "Connections" tab has a "Set Default" and "Clear Default" button but nothing happens when I click either of them. BOINC worked last night after I installed it. Any suggestions??

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hedera
karenivy@mindspring.com
How do you know the planet Mars is not carried around by an angel?
-- J. B. S. Haldane

Access to reference site failed - check network connection or proxy configuration.

This is suspicious. It's saying that BOINC can't connect to the outside world.

Did you just get the latest Windows update?
Sometimes this changes the settings of the firewall.

Access to reference site failed - check network connection or proxy configuration.

This is suspicious. It's saying that BOINC can't connect to the outside world.

Did you just get the latest Windows update?
Sometimes this changes the settings of the firewall.

I may have done; I get them automatically. I always forget the stupid firewall settings; I'll check that.

Bingo! My stupid Norton Internet Security had Permit all for the BOINC manager and Block all for the client... Thanks, Les!

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hedera
karenivy@mindspring.com
How do you know the planet Mars is not carried around by an angel?
-- J. B. S. Haldane