There's a bug in the master URL comparison.

The path part of the URL is case sensitive, that is correct.

The protocol/server/domain parts are not case sensitive!

Example :

http://Boinc.Berkeley.Edu/dev and http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev are equivalent

so BOINC should not whine about a wrong master URL.


Solution : lowercase all characters in the URLs up to the 3rd slash (or the end of the string) and then use them. That's faster and easier to handle than splitting the string and comparing the components separate.

Forwarded to the responsible parties.

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Thank you :-)

I still haven't figured out why Boinc allows us to attach to projects if the URL is wrong, and only subsequently complains about the URL once workunits are running. Wouldn't it be more efficient to reject it earlier in the process?

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Extreme example is Rosetta, they have a little less than a zillion URLs which all lead to a valid(!) master URL with a scheduler tag.

BOINC is just too picky with the URL, even minor changes (cosmology.org vs. www.cosmology.org) or even irrelevant changes (MindModeling.org vs. mindmodeling.org) cause complaints.

The best solution would be to allow attach to any URL that leads to a correct master page, but then ask the scheduler about the correct URL and adjust all state entries, XML file names, subdirectories etc. to this scheduler-given URL.

Same for URL changes (e.g. http://lhcathome.cern.ch/ to http://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/), the client should just adjust everything lossless(!) instead of complaining.

The major problem is that the URL is part of the file-/directory names instead of using an abstract common key (derived from the project name instead of the project master URL) for all files/directories/state entries of a project.


p.s.: I'm not happy with the concept of this "master page" anyway, it downloads lots of crap (from the CC view) just to extract one small XML tag. Having a separate "project_setup.xml" in the master path root would be much better, it would be independant from database and PHP problems on the master page, it would be much smaller (WCG has 32k master page!!!), easier to parse and it could contain some more informations (like the unique project key). It would not generate database queries either, no UOTD and stuff like that - stuff for users, useless for the core client. The master page is the best example of how function and design should not be mixed.

p.s.: I'm not happy with the concept of this "master page" anyway, it downloads lots of crap (from the CC view) just to extract one small XML tag. Having a separate "project_setup.xml" in the master path root would be much better, it would be independant from database and PHP problems on the master page, it would be much smaller (WCG has 32k master page!!!), easier to parse and it could contain some more informations (like the unique project key). It would not generate database queries either, no UOTD and stuff like that - stuff for users, useless for the core client. The master page is the best example of how function and design should not be mixed.

The stupid thing is that there is such thing already, it's called get_project_config.php. Yet the scheduler URLs are taken from the frontpage.

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There's a bug in the master URL comparison.

The path part of the URL is case sensitive, that is correct.

The protocol/server/domain parts are not case sensitive!

Example :

http://Boinc.Berkeley.Edu/dev and http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev are equivalent

so BOINC should not whine about a wrong master URL.


Solution : lowercase all characters in the URLs up to the 3rd slash (or the end of the string) and then use them. That's faster and easier to handle than splitting the string and comparing the components separate.

DNS is not case sensitive, everything between :// and / is DNS.

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I didn't realise the Boinc servers compare URLs via DNS, I thought they did a simple textual compare of two strings? (Unless you're just adding detail to Ananas's post)?

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It complains about a wrong URL when it compares (strcmp) the configured master URL (on project side) and the attached master URL (on client side) and they are not identical.

Attach to

http://mindmodeling.org/beta/

and it will tell you that it would rather want to be attached to

http://MindModeling.org/beta/

<master_url>http://MindModeling.org/beta/</master_url>

Copying the link location http://MindModeling.org/beta/ lowercases the server/domain part (at least SeaMonkey does that) even though you can see it mixed case in the HTML source.
It is correct behaviour, the browser doesn't do anything wrong, but BOINC doesn't understand that.

p.s.: I tested it with IE6, it lowercases the server part too.