I am new to this and please advise

We are currently proofing a requirement with our Company 'Serco'. The requirement from Serco is to design a custom screen saver using VB6 and
be able to allow configure / mass installation of BOINC client through our screensaver . The proper questions to our requirements as follows

1) What is the best option of installing BOINC clients on about 4000 pc's accross a Company internet.
2) We would like a single logon which the clients uses to access a defined project which we control.Is this possible for many clients to use one account to a certain project ?
3) Do you have API'S for visual Basic 6 which we can use to configure the client, e.g cpu usage,memory usage and others.
4) We do not want Boinc interfering with our custom screensaver but only to activate on low pc usage.
5) Could we embed the BOINC client in our screensaver with out the need of a full client installation (e.g have only necessary components of BOINC and embed this on our screensaver code)

Many kind thanks

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wooa nellie, that's alot of puters. Just so you know, most people answering questions here are just regular users that volunteer time to do so. The actual devs are few and don't necessarily read these boards regularly. This might be best asked directly to them. I'm not willing to give out personal email addresses, but you could sign up for the "Boinc Developers" mail list, and ask this question there. I know it'll get seen by the right people.

tony

1. Assuming they are windows machines you can use active directories to customise and deploy the BOINC client.

2. Using one account for all these computers is not a problem. In fact the easiest way to attach them is to manually attach one then copy the account*.xml file from that host to all the new hosts.

3. The preferences are all web based. Percent of CPU is not currently an option. However BOINC launches apps at a very low priority so they normally get out of the way when anything else runs.

4. BOINC can be set up independantly from the screensaver and can be set to run only when idle.

5. This should be possible but since BOINC can be set up independantly it is probably not worth the effort.

The wiki has a wealth of information that may help you, see the link in my sig.

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BOINC WIKI

BOINCing since 2002/12/8

Many kind thanks on this....
I am new to this so please accept my apologies for not understanding

What do you mean

(2. Using one account for all these computers is not a problem. In fact the easiest way to attach them is to manually attach one then copy the account*.xml file from that host to all the new hosts.)

So in my senerio... the company decides to do a research hookup.I contact the research and create an account and get id file and a site. The company decides now we need to rollout the account to all pc's . Would you say that the XML be kept centrally and the clients will pick up the changes.

We want to take this serious and of course be helpful to alot of researches

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Many kind thanks on this....
I am new to this so please accept my apologies for not understanding

What do you mean

(2. Using one account for all these computers is not a problem. In fact the easiest way to attach them is to manually attach one then copy the account*.xml file from that host to all the new hosts.)

So in my senerio... the company decides to do a research hookup.I contact the research and create an account and get id file and a site. The company decides now we need to rollout the account to all pc's . Would you say that the XML be kept centrally and the clients will pick up the changes.

We want to take this serious and of course be helpful to alot of researches

At the moment, as I understand it, Boinc as certain requirement.
Boinc needs to be install on each PC and operate independently with access to the internet.

There is no mass deployment option at the moment, but it is on the todo list.

To bypass the need for each computer to attach to a project, you can create a base system that attaches to the project then copy the Boinc folder to all the other systems with all the needed files. A Boinc install will still need to be done on top of this folder at each computer, but it would be ready to start downloading work immediately.

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Boinc V 7.4.36
Win7 i5 3.33G 4GB NVidia 470

Here is a pretty good write up of doing a mass deployment of the client software:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread?thread=5792

I should check back with him, he was changing the script around to make it generic and work for multiple project.

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----- Rom
BOINC Development Team, U.C. Berkeley
My Blog

I have managed to get things working now by copying the account*.xml and restarting the service. Question

The issue I have is to package it up using msiexec using the paramters of

msiexec /i boinc.msi /qn /l c:\\boinc.log setuptype='Service' ALLUSERS=0
ENABLESCREENSAVER=0 ENABLELAUNCHATLOGON=0
LAUNCHPROGRAM=0 SERVICE_DOMAINUSERNAME='%COMPUTERNAME%\\%USERNAME%'
SERVICE_PASSWORD='%PASSWORD%'
SERVICE_GRANTEXECUTIONRIGHT=1

I expect it to load it as a service . But going into Windows services I cant see , My logon allows it to start services and i have admin rights. Therefore
USERNAME is me ... what is happening ?

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also I need to roll this out on windows 95 any ideas ?

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also I need to roll this out on windows 95 any ideas ?

Win 95 presents its own challenges since it's not directly supported by Boinc. I've seen posts of work arounds on the Seti and Seti-Beta forum. I'll see if I can locate those posts.

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Boinc V 7.4.36
Win7 i5 3.33G 4GB NVidia 470

ALSO this is important ... and all of you I really appreciate this help very much


I have managed to get things working now by copying the account*.xml and restarting the service. Question

The issue I have is to package it up using msiexec using the paramters of

msiexec /i boinc.msi /qn /l c:\\boinc.log setuptype='Service' ALLUSERS=0
ENABLESCREENSAVER=0 ENABLELAUNCHATLOGON=0
LAUNCHPROGRAM=0 SERVICE_DOMAINUSERNAME='%COMPUTERNAME%\\%USERNAME%'
SERVICE_PASSWORD='%PASSWORD%'
SERVICE_GRANTEXECUTIONRIGHT=1

I expect it to load it as a service . But going into Windows services I cant see it , My logon allows it to start services and i have admin rights. Therefore
USERNAME is me ... what is happening ?

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