Posts by Bill Roland

1) Message boards : Questions and problems : BOINC 6, 2 questions (Message 22769)
Posted 30 Jan 2009 by Bill Roland
Post:
I've asked the developer for a comment. He said that the NetworkService Account has more limitations than the boinc_master limited account has. It will not allow anyone else to launch processes, for instance. Which would make it impossible to then install BOINC as a service and have anyone else control BOINC Manager.

I appreciate that, thanks.
2) Message boards : Questions and problems : BOINC 6, 2 questions (Message 22766)
Posted 30 Jan 2009 by Bill Roland
Post:
You do not have to edit the registry to stop BOINC manager from starting. In the advanced view under the advanced tab there is a checkbox for running the manager at startup. Still more cumbersome than I would like but not as bad as digging in the registry.

No, that only works for that user. The next user that signs in will have to do the same thing, and so on and so forth. 100% unnecessary.

EDIT: If you have a Windows Active Directory network with at least Windows Server 2003 R2, you can use Group Policy to remove that registry entry automatically. Shouldn't have to resort to that, but at least it will minimize the headache.
3) Message boards : Questions and problems : BOINC 6, 2 questions (Message 22406)
Posted 13 Jan 2009 by Bill Roland
Post:

The NetworkService Account is not available in Windows 2000, so it's not an option to use.

For the rest of the reasons as to why BOINC creates the accounts, read this thread.
I was aware that the NetworkService account is not available in Windows 2000. However Windows 2000 will be 9 years old next month, will have only another year and a half of security patch support from Microsoft, and by most estimates makes up less than 1.5% of the Windows market. Its a pretty hard sell to recreate the wheel based on that information. It would be far easier just to tell the installer that if its on Windows 2000, use the LocalSystem account (Like it did until BOINC 6).


Remove boincmgr from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
But that proves my point; as a system administrator who is donating (that's the key word) idle CPU to research projects using BOINC, I don't have time to figure out why I've got 15 trouble tickets from people asking what "Bionic" is, must less track down that BOINC has added a key to the Registry for 50 PCs that causes BOINC Manager to start up for every user.

Maybe there should be a special build for corporate environments where "Service Install" means use the built in Service appropriate for the installation (NetworkService) and an option for "Never start BOINC Manager automatically." I'm just asking that the developers look at it from our standpoint, sometimes these things that look great on paper and the white board just don't make sense in practical use.
4) Message boards : Questions and problems : BOINC 6, 2 questions (Message 22355)
Posted 9 Jan 2009 by Bill Roland
Post:
Why can't BOINC6 use the NetworkService built in account in Windows instead of creating all sorts of users accounts and groups to run under? When I specify that account manually it runs fine. It seems like it would be a lot easier than the current method.

How can I stop BOINC 6.4 and later (apparently) from insisting on starting up the BOINC Manager for each user who logs into the computer? I know where to turn it off in the Manager, but that is only per user, and the default seems to be to launch it on logon for each user. Doesn't work very well when you've got a network with lots of users and you want BOINC to do its work behind the scenes. I'm guessing its a registry key somewhere.

Thanks.
5) Message boards : BOINC client : Vista Client running Boinc projects all the time. (Message 12614)
Posted 20 Sep 2007 by Bill Roland
Post:
I can confirm this problem as well. Service install, doesn't matter if I run it as Local System or as a user with "Log on as a service" permissions. I was going around in circles for a while because I couldn't duplicate it on my home Vista unit, but, I'm running it as "Single User" and not Service Install.

There's a potential for quite a bit of lost CPU time here, I'm going to have to put these units on a schedule that bars crunching between business hours, instead of being able to crunch when the units are idle.
6) Message boards : BOINC client : BOINC 5.10 has now been released to public. (Message 11239)
Posted 26 Jun 2007 by Bill Roland
Post:
When I upgraded to this official 5.10 build I lost both SOCKS and HTTP proxy support on a Vista Business 32bit and XP SP2 system. Is there any way to fix this?
Same here.
7) Message boards : BOINC client : SOCKS problem on Windows Vista x64 with BOINC 5.10.x? (Message 11089)
Posted 20 Jun 2007 by Bill Roland
Post:
Thanks for the report Bill.

I sent it to the alpha list.

You may want to subscribe.

http://www.ssl.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/boinc_alpha

FYI I was able to duplicate this problem upgrading a client from 5.8.16 to 5.10.7 32 bit as well on Windows XP SP2. Following upgrade, BOINC cannot use the SOCKS proxy at all, and looking at the logs on the SOCKS proxy, I see no evidence that BOINC even made an effort to connect to it.
8) Message boards : BOINC client : SOCKS problem on Windows Vista x64 with BOINC 5.10.x? (Message 11015)
Posted 18 Jun 2007 by Bill Roland
Post:
Thanks for the report Bill.

I sent it to the alpha list.

You may want to subscribe.

http://www.ssl.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/boinc_alpha

You're welcome. I will look into subscribing to the list, and if I discover any additional info on this I will be sure to post here. Thanks!
9) Message boards : BOINC client : SOCKS problem on Windows Vista x64 with BOINC 5.10.x? (Message 11012)
Posted 18 Jun 2007 by Bill Roland
Post:
I ran into a problem I thought I should report (and this seems like the place to do it) with the new 5.10.x builds. Our machines at the office are, at the moment, all using BOINC 5.8.16 and using SOCKS proxy settings to relay through SOCKSPuppet to WCG (because BOINC doesn't do NTLM so HTTP proxy is out). This configuration works fine. I recently brought a Vista Business x64 machine online for testing purposes in our network, and I installed BOINC 5.10.6 for Windows x64 beta on it. Install completed successfully, I went in and specified the SOCKS proxy, and then tried to attach to the project. It didn't work. The message center revealed nothing in particular of any interest, and from what I could tell monitoring my SOCKSPuppet proxy, it never received any traffic at all from BOINC 5.10.6 on the Vista x64 machine. I reinstalled, etc, triple checked my proxy entry, etc, nothing. After an hour I uninstalled it and tried 5.8.16 (which of course runs in 32 bit emulation in WOW), and to my surprise, it attached to the WCG project immediately and began downloading work.

I have not had the ability to try and duplicate this issue again. 5.10.7 (and all the 5.10.x builds) has worked fine on my Vista x64 Ultimate home machine, but there is no proxy that BOINC has to use for that.

I will try my best to try and test this on an alternate Vista x64 machine, but in the meantime if anyone else with a similar config feels up to testing it out and reporting in, that might be helpful too. :)

By the way, I'm a fairly recent convert from the UD client. BOINC is amazing when compared to that, keep up the great work folks.



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