Posts by doggybob

InfoMessage
21) Message boards : Questions and problems : Kubuntu 12.04 will not run BOINC 7.0.28
Message 46931
Posted 28 Dec 2012 by doggybob
You aren't specific but it sounds like you were running Ubuntu 12.04 and BOINC 7.0.28 ran OK then you switched from gnome desktop to kde desktop (Kubuntu) and discovered 7.0.28 would no longer run.

If that's the case then remember 7.0.28 is compiled on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS which uses gnome not kde. From what you say I gather installing kde replaces some library BOINC needs with a library kde needs though I think the package installer should have raised some warnings about removing a required package. Maybe it didn't or maybe it did but you ignored the warning and forced it to proceed.

The switch from gnome to kde (again, assuming that's what you did) is mostly a switch in graphics related libs, probably gtk, so I suspect it's just BOINC manager 7.0.28 that will not run with kde. I have a hunch BOINC client 7.0.28 will still run fine for you since it does not use graphics libs. It is not necessary for the client and manager version to match. For example I used manager 6.12.x with client 7.0.10 with no problems. If you need 7.0.28 then you could run 7.0.28 client and 7.0.27 manager, assuming I am correct in my analysis and 7.0.28 client will run with kde.

BTW, the ldd command tells you which libs a binary requires and whether you have them or not. For example ldd boinc lists all the libs boinc client needs and tells you which ones it can find on your system and which ones it cannot find. ldd boinc | grep "not found" shortens the output to just libs ldd could not find on your system.
22) Message boards : Questions and problems : Intel vs. AMD
Message 46928
Posted 27 Dec 2012 by doggybob
I'm unable to make a comparison with the Intel setup but I run a bulldozer that might at least give you some numbers to look at.


http://boincstats.com/en/stats/-1/user/detail/41192/charts


Thanks for taking the time to answer but unfortunately those numbers are BOINC credits which means they're meaningless, a complete waste of bandwidth and server storage space, no good for anything. They have about as much relevance to the question (or any question) as the daily stock quotes do.

I'm looking for drag race type of comparison. One i7 versus one bulldozer, similar clock, both running the same task... who finishes first? Repeat with several tasks from the same application/project, repeat with several different projects.

The problem with a drag race scenario is that some science apps never run the same way twice given the same input parameters so some apps wouldn't constitute a true "drag strip" to run the race on. The strip would be a guarter mile for one CPU but end up a half mile for the other.

I might use the info boinctsats has on record for you to pore through tasks you've run at your projects and look for tasks where you wingman was a similarly clocked ivy/sandy bridge Intel. No wait, I've got it... a script that crawls through a project's user results pages and finds WUs that have been sent to a bulldozer and an ivy/sandy bridge and then saves the run time numbers for comparison. Projects that have an initial replication of 2 or more.
23) Message boards : Questions and problems : using git fails to download boinc code
Message 46926
Posted 27 Dec 2012 by doggybob
You're going about this the wrong way.

Going from an established, mature distro like Fedora or Ubuntu to a a less established and less mature distro only invites problems. Mature, established distros simply have way more people watching, testing and fixing than do distros like centOS. I know for sure centOs users are going to leap to the defense of their pet and say how wellit works for them but hey.... the point is the chances it's going to work well for YOU. You cannot beat having more eyes watching and more hands fixing unless the distro is so plugged up with politics and fighting the whole thing comes so a standstill as seems to be the case with openSuSe but Fedora and Ubuntu don't seem to have that problem, IMHO.

I have never had any problem with nvidia drivers on Fedora or Ubuntu. The folks at nvidia know Ubuntu is the most widely used distro so they know their product better install there hassle free. Fedora is very popular too and the same argument applies. CentOS isn't so popular so it gets less attention. Glad it worked for you but you're better off getting the nvidia driver to install on Ubuntu than jumping to centOS because you will have a difficult time getting BOINC code to compile on any platform let alone an obscure platform like centOS. Again, in about 10 minutes you'll see posts here claiming how easy it is but they won't tell you how to do it and if they do you'll likely find following their suggestions to the letter will not give you what you want which is BOINC binaries. Been there a thousand times and it's not the way you want to go. Git is just the beginning of your woes. If you get around git be prepared for a dozen more problems such as missing libraries you cannot find for love nor money and if you do they won't install on your distro anyway. Catch 22? No, catch1022 but don't take my word for it, nooooo, jump all the hoops yourself, you owe it to yourself to experience the frustration.

Reinstall Ubuntu and do whatever you have to do to get the nvidia drivers to install. A million other users have done it and you can too. Don't make the stupid mistake of thinking that just because you have the highest release number that that means it has the best chance of working. NO!!! Go to the forums where the people who have it working hang out (the gpugrid forums) and read, it's all there, all you have to do is read and think. Or you can just beg and grovel until they tell you what you're doing wrong.

The reason you want to stick with Ubuntu at any cost if you're running BOINC is because the BOINC installers pretty much guarantee the Berkeley installer (find out what the Berkeley installer is if you don't what it is at this point) will work on the current Ubuntu LTS. Find out what Ubuntu LTS is if you don't know exactly what LTS means. If you don't like all that convenience then the alternative, the BOINC package from Ubuntu repositories, works very well too although in your case you don't want to go that route because the resulting daemon install won't work with the nvidia drivers unless you jump a number of additional hoops. That's the easy recipe: Ubuntu, Berkeley installer, nvidia. Or do it the hard way.
24) Message boards : News : New project seeks testers
Message 46925
Posted 27 Dec 2012 by doggybob
Jim,

Email Dave's appointments secretary at madge@boinc.berkeley.edu and book an appointment. He'll fly down there on SETI's Gulfstream and attach your computer for you. Won't cost you a dime. No BS!! He won't come unless you promise to make him perogies, all he can eat, and put out Ben and Jerry's for dessert. And no comments about how his pants make him look fat it hurts his feelings.
25) Message boards : Projects : SETI@home is a waste of time, computing power & electricity
Message 46924
Posted 27 Dec 2012 by doggybob
It's true SETI spawned BOINC but that doesn't mean SETI is a sensible way to spend your unused CPU cycles. And it is a fact that if it discovered an ET SETI would become the most important project. Unfortunately that fact doesn't change the fact that the chance of finding an ET is so small we can call it 0 chance. There are a trillion different ways an ET civilization could be communicating and generating signals that demonstrate there is an intelligence behind them. To think that SETI project has even the slightest chance of discovering those signals is absolutely absurd. Anybody who thinks that also believes it is possible to put a lump of sugar in a dead pig's mouth and suck on its anus and eventually taste some sweetness.

I am convinced there are ETs out there and I have a hunch they may have visited Earth already but we're not going to find them with a project like SETI. There's nothing wrong with the way the project is managed or run it's just that their methodology will never find what they seek. Now here is the trick... If we had more spare CPU cycles than we knew what to do with then heck why not spend some of those on a useless search. Unfortunately spare CPU cycles are in short supply. We don't have enough to go around so the wise thing to do is spend them on projects that have some chance of success, even a miniscule chance but not on SETI which has 0 chance.
26) Message boards : Projects : Resources wasted on Primegrid project?
Message 46923
Posted 27 Dec 2012 by doggybob
I agree. The merits of some of these projects are dubious when compared to the possibilities of others.


Merit and dubiousness are a matter of perspective. For example, if you didn't know about cancer then many of the health related projects would be of duubious merit to you.

I do the health ones, but I also do a couple astronomy ones. Nothing is more fundamental to us than the realities of the universe.


Prime numbers have much to do with the mathematics we use to describe, quantify and investigate the realities of the universe. I suspect you have much to learn on that topic.

Prime numbers? It's possible there will be some future application


There are real and important applications for prime numbers today in the field of data encryption just for one example. Data encryption is related to your health by the fact that if certain people decrypt your government's military communications they'll launch one of your own nukes and make you its target or wait until your government launches one then redirect it back to you. That could interfere with your desire to live longer.



...but also it's possible that in the future random flips of the coin will be important too.


They're important right now and have been since the beginning of time.


So maybe we should have a random_coin_flip@home where a computer flips a coin over and over again......as it comes ever closer to 50%.


That *would* be a useless project. The nature of randomness is pretty much understood. A coin flipper project wouldn't teach us anything. The study of primes does.
27) Message boards : BOINC client : boinccmd has no rpc port option?
Message 46840
Posted 17 Dec 2012 by doggybob
I like to control some of my hosts with boinccmd unfortunately I need to put those hosts on a port other than 31416. Boinccmd has no command line option for gui-rpc-port. The client and manager both have such an option and it would be nice if boinccmd did too. I'm using version 6.12.34.
28) Message boards : Questions and problems : continuation
Message 46839
Posted 17 Dec 2012 by doggybob
That other thread got locked accidentally so I'll just pick it up here.

Hmmm, I seem to remember that BOINC is something David came up with, not you.


Where did I say otherwise? I don't think I did.

It is however an Open Source program, you can go and download the source code, change everything you don't like, add to it and then release it under a name of your own.


If he wants me to fix his code then he's going to have to comment it. Right now it's a million bytes of code and 76 bytes of comments. Been there, done that, I don't do it anymore. Self-commenting? That's a hoax perpetrated by coders who are too lazy to comment. Or they don't really understand how/why their code works it just does so they don't say anything that could expose the fact they don't really know what's going on.

I think you're trying to tell me I am not allowed to criticize BOINC or its developers so I checked the EULA and sure enough it says I am not allowed to criticize BOINC or its developers if I use it. OK, I no longer use BOINC. I've uninstalled it and deleted it from my hosts and I gave my BOINC T-shirt to a homeless guy I found picking pop cans from my neighbor's trash bin. Now I'm allowed to criticize, right?

Really my feeling is they should pay me for engineering their stuff properly for them but there's not much chance of that now since you hid my post explaining how they can get rich. Or did you stamp that post "Urgent" and forward it right up the ladder to the top for immediate implementation? Whatever. The bottom line is I'm giving all this good stuff for free and it beats the pants off what they're doing and you know it and that's why you're quelling it... it's embarassing to the devs.
29) Message boards : Questions and problems : No more running tasks; reason hard to find
Message 46835
Posted 17 Dec 2012 by doggybob
So, the out-of-disk condition should get a notice.


That works for me for the out-of-disk problem but I don't think it's the best solution for the problem in general and that problem is: errors and warnings are difficult to see when they are included in a deluge of messages the way they are now. There was and still is a very simple solution for that problem and that very simple solution is the one I still propose: a toggle that will hide all the superfluous messages in Event Log and show only errors and warnings. Any message with the word error or warning in it would be shown in that short list therefore all one need to do is put one of those keywods in their error or warning and poof! like magic there error/warning become easy to spot. Yah, I know, that's so simple it sucks. There must be a more complicated way and once again Dave has shown he is the man who can find that way.

Instead of implementing the simple, easy, direct solution he creates a new problem by creating Notices. Now we have to fight and argue over each and every important condition/message that should get a notice, for example the out-of-disk notice. Now us lucky people have earned the privilege of fighting to have all the other errors put in notices too. We'll have to fight message-by-message, condition-by-condition, each one a separate fight and argument, the whole thing shouldn't take more than 27 years as it gets put on the back burner so more newly screwed up stuff (like disk sharing) can be implemented first. He doesn't fix problems, he just turns them into new and more numerous problems and does so in ways that make the basic problem even more convoluted and harder to fix. That's not software engineering. That's called "screwing stuff up and turning half-broken easily fixed things into a completely broken hard to fix tangled mess". That's more truth than he can swallow so I see a banishing in my near future. Lol, as if I care. As if there aren't a trillion other IPs to post from.
30) Message boards : Questions and problems : Volunteer Storage: what project available?
Message 46832
Posted 17 Dec 2012 by doggybob
No news, just some critical thinking and some questions...

Where are they going to find a project admin desperate enough to store his data on disks that come and go like gypsys in the night? It's an interesting concept but it isn't going to happen. You can count on a disk owned by a commercial enterprise or university (just 2 examples, there are probably more) being reliably available because they are owned and administered by professionals/experts. But a disk owned by Mario Potoshnyak, a migrant brick layer building dikes in the Netherlands running on Winblows and a power supply so plugged up with dust it's ready to burst into flames at any moment? No surge protection? Full of kiddie porn and likely to be confiscated by the cops any day? Behind Swiss cheese firewall and so full of viruses they fight to see which one will wipe the disk? OK, so you imitate a RAID and stripe your data across 100 unreliable disks, 50% of which can't be accessed at any given time because Norton won't allow it because the admin's on crak and reverted to a restore point set before you contacted him to explain what AV software is and how to tell Norton to allow your server to access his disk. So you email him but he doesn't remember who you are or you find he's changed his mind because your data slows down his shoot 'em up game so he's deleted your data. The other 50% are down due to <pick a reason from the 100 entry list and insert it here> and now where is your data? The overhead you'll spend resyncing data over a Dave A. goofy RAID will require a server of its own and an additional $100 worth of bandwidth from your ISP every month. Why not just buy another server of your own, a few 3 TB drives and save your bandwidth? Or rent some cloud storage from a reliable enterprise like Amazon, Google, etc. Look around and see how little storage costs these days, it really is amazing.

If you have a burning need to provide your favorite project with disk space then setup a reliable RAID 10 and let him mount it as NAS or throw in an Apache daemon and let him access it on http or ftp. I did it for a project and they love it. I give them 4 X 3 TB disks plus a hot spare in RAID 10 plus a virgin 3 TB disk in it's original package sitting on the shelf ready to be pluged in if one of the 4 primary disks fail and the hot spare kicks in. It runs on Linux's free mdisk RAID software. I went to a local business and twisted their arm until they donated a disk. Then I went to their competitor and told them their competitor was beating them. The I went to a third business and told them what their 2 competitors are doing and suddenly I had a third new 3TB disk in my bag. The other 3 disks came via the same "you're falling behind arm twisting strategy". Now my ISP is expressing some interest in giving me free unlimited bandwidth every month! Another store gave me a 275 GB hybrid disk to put the boot, main binaries and swap partitions on. The thing boots in 4 seconds with an X session. I got 16 GB RAM donated to the cause, all brand new stuff. I talked to the guy who runs the battery shop and he told me why every UPS I see on the store shelf is junk and he gave me 3 huge brand new AGM lead-acid, deep cycle batteries, a really cool 40 amp battery charger, a 1,000 watt power inverter and showed me how to assemble it all into one exquisite backup/spike-protection/line-noise-filter any sysadmin would kill to own. It powers the 3 machines I own for at least 4 hours if the mains go down. Cost me a coffee, a donut, a smile and some brown-nosing. I built it all into a small cabinet that sucks winter air in from the outside, filters it through a HEPA filter and discharges the hot air to the outdoors. It's 10 Celsius inside the cabinet right now and there is a GTX 570 GPU in there running full blast. Cost me $30 to build, no BS. In the summer I'll patch in a small AC unit for July and August. Something like that a struggling new project can use and you can build one too. 100 mickey mouse 167 GB gypsy partitions held together by string in a Dave A. RAID will be nothing but a PITA for a project admin. A few very desperate ones might try it but not for long. Experienced admins will shy away. They can see how well CreditNew and the scheduler work so tagging the disk share scheme as another one of Dave's broken pipedreams will come easy. Not that BOINC isn't an amazing system but some of its components suck bigtime, sorry Dave, spades are spades here.
31) Message boards : Questions and problems : No more running tasks; reason hard to find
Message 46831
Posted 17 Dec 2012 by doggybob
Their budget is also dwindling fast, the grands money being less each year.


Grants, not grands. <===== nit pick

That problem is easy to solve. Berkeley is an American university. All the Americans need to do is whip up some lies about some WMD, invade some helpless country over the lies, borrow all the money they need to fun the invasion and then poof! the Magic Money Genie will make them all incredibly wealthy and happy. There will be a pot on every stove and a plump chicken in every pot. The BOINC devs will have more money than they can possibly spend in 2 lifetimes. They'll hire all the programmers who don't have jobs now and they'll churn out code faster than an Indian pukes up Listerine the morning after his welfare cheque goes into the bank.
</sarcasm>

At one point in time it's very probable that the developers stop their development, them splitting off to other venues, and you'll be looking at the last available Berkeley client, its development then resting purely on the shoulders of you, the vast and unpaid community.


Oh happy day! The first thing we'll do is snip out all the credits related code which will put an end to the barrels of nonsense and wasted time that happens due to credits. Then we'll base the scheduler on the realities of the modern world instead of pretending we all run 300 baud phone line modems we bought in 1984. (What purpose does a cache serve other than to inflate SETI's database to the point their server can't handle it? Oh, it's so we can grab extra tasks in case their server goes down due to database overload. Wow, that's really smard!!!)

Another problem is how eloquent are you going to be? And how long is the translation going to be in other languages? Yes, an error message can become more eloquent, stretch for 3 or more lines in English, but how is that going to be translated in all the languages that BOINC is available in?


Not a big problem. After the Americans realize how rich they can become destroying helpless countries on borrowed money they will invade *everybody* and make them *all* speak English. That will put the people programming the online translators out of work but of course Berkeley will be able to hire them and churn out BOINC code even faster. Don't worry, once the lies about WMD get rolling and the troops get pumped up it will all fall into place.

But whereas "Not requesting tasks: scheduler RPC backoff" can be easily translated into different languages, perhaps something like "Not requesting asks: the last time that BOINC tried to do this, either the server didn't answer, or your internet had its own troubles, or there was no work available. BOINC is backing off for so many minutes before it tries again automatically. You can stop mashing the Update button." is a bit more difficult to translate. ;-)


Nonsense. Difficult for an online translator bot but not difficult for a human fluent in both languages.

The real problem is Berkeley's stoneage thinking. They don't want to add another 100 KB to BOINC package because they still think we all run 300 baud modems connected to our phone line. They can't get past that so turf 'em, sooner the better.[/quote]

If there was money enough at Berkeley, if they had programmers available to them, if there were enough people willing to do research, learn and document, I'm sure it would all be possible. Programmers and documenters aren't going to help out if they aren't going to be paid for it.


Nonsense. The problem is Berkeley does nothing to curry the favor of those who can help and instead throws every possible roadblock and stoneage mentality in their way. Little wonder they get no help.
32) Message boards : Questions and problems : No more running tasks; reason hard to find
Message 46829
Posted 16 Dec 2012 by doggybob
doggybob wrote:
...but your average BOINCer doesn't have a clue about stdoutdae, where to find it, what a text editor is, how to open a file in it, let alone how to search for things.

Which is the intent of the Messages window. Before this time it was a Messages tab in BOINC Manager, yet 'the average BOINC user' would perceive all messages in there as error messages, get scared and uninstall BOINC. That doesn't help science at all.

And so there's a somewhat hidden Messages window, for the more advanced types of people, who know a thing or two about their computer and about BOINC. You can adjust the amount of information you see through adding or subtracting flags in the client configuration file cc_config.xml.


We were talking about how the error messages in Event Log could be made more visible weren't we? I suggested a button that would temporarily hide all the non-error messages and show only error messages. While your response is certainly factual I don't think it relates to my suggestion. Or maybe I missed the point. Please explain.

As for the actual task related errors, they're easily found at the project web sites. All errors are stored as Errors in the Tasks section of Your Account, the stderr.txt part of the task is stored with every task's Result ID outcome. If you need help then, you can point to such an error in the project forums.


That's all true but doesn't explain why my suggestion (which was to hide all the non-error messages and show only the error messages to make them easier to find since then they would not be mixed in with all the non-error messages) is a good idea or a bad idea. That was the OP's complaint: the error messages are hard to pick out when they are mixed in with all the other messages. He wasn't asking for a better way to know what the messages mean, he was just asking for something that would make them easier to spot in Event Log. Again, you may not be able to comprehend that some people would find it difficult to spot an error message and that's probably because you have average to above average reading skill but many,many readers are not so lucky. Again, this has nothing to do with interpreting the messages, it all about making the messages themselves easier to see in Event Log. Maybe now you understand better why I mentioned loading the entire log into a text editor and using the editor's search function to look for words like error, missing, not found, etc. as that would help a person find the lines that contain an error message.
33) Message boards : Questions and problems : No more running tasks; reason hard to find
Message 46819
Posted 16 Dec 2012 by doggybob
It would help if BOINC had some way of hiding all the superfluous messages (such as 'restarting task 282-f9f7633k_0-0") in Event Log and displaying only error messages. A button that toggles 'tween All Messages and Error Messages is the general idea. Yes, we can open stdoutdae in a text editor and search for words like error, failed, missing and so on but your average BOINCer doesn't have a clue about stdoutdae, where to find it, what a text editor is, how to open a file in it, let alone how to search for things. They need it simple and easy. What they really need is for someone to remote login to their host and fix whatever's wrong and the sooner the devs implement that the better but until then an errors only window would be a huge improvement.

Another option is to display all error messages in red and warnings in yellow. It probably seems to you that nobody could possibly miss a red line in a sea of black but that's because you have normal to above average reading skills. People with lesser skill will not spot the red line if text is scrolling because the effort required to scroll the text with their mouse/keyboard hand distracts their brain away from the signals their eye is sending to the brain. That red line can go right by them and they won't see it. Hard for someone with your reading skills to imagine that some people are that challenged but they are.
34) Message boards : Questions and problems : Intel vs. AMD
Message 46784
Posted 13 Dec 2012 by doggybob
The Intel core technology processors (ivy league) are kicking the latest AMD technology (bulldozer) butt in every hardware review I read. However, AMD prices are extremely competitive. Compare the following 2 mobo+cpu bundles offered by an online retailer:

Coreā„¢ i7-3770K Processor (ivy bridge) on Asus P8Z77-V PRO for $519.99

AMD FX-8320 Processor (bulldozer) on Asus M5A99FX PRO R2.0 for $319.99

That's a $200 difference!! True there is an ~$60 difference in the price of the mobos alone and that's because the mobo for the Intel has PCI-E 3.0 and USB 3.0 whereas the mobo for the AMD is PCI-E 2.0 and USB 2.0. My thinking is 2.0 is plenty fast enough for what I want to do.

The AMD is an 8 core device whereas the Intel is 4 core with hyper-threading which gives 8 virtual cores. The clock speeds are similar. Yet the i7 trounces the AMD on every test they mention in every hardware test and review article I have since bulldozer became available.

OK, Intel beats the AMD in the tests they use in those articles. So what, I don't game or edit video or do most of the other stuff they do in those tests. What I am interested in is how AMD and Intel compare when 8 science apps from BOINC projects are running... does Intel still rule in that situation? You see AMD's response to the unfavorable test reviews is that the apps used in the tests do not multi-thread the way they need to to take full advantage of bulldozer technology. If that is true then perhaps 8 separate CPU intense apps running simultaneously would suit bulldozer technology. In other words, maybe AMD would beat Intel for BOINCing. Does anybody know? Would anybody care to pretend they know? Does anybody care?

The reason I ask is that I need to get a Christmas present for the nicest person I know (that would be me) and he wants a hot new BOINCing machine so please help me decide which one of the above bundles would be best.
35) Message boards : BOINC client : who's smashing my stack!!???
Message 46627
Posted 6 Dec 2012 by doggybob
solved and fixed!

it turns out it was not the app i mentioned earlier in this thread, the one using 89% of the host's RAM, that's a problem but after the job it was running completed and i was able to shutdown that app the stack smashing problem reported by boinc persisted so it must no be the dastardly stack smasher

the real smasher was hinted at in the URL i mentioned earlier where they said the stack smashing error can indicate the app is trying to read a 20 (for example) char input into a 19 char buffer, i hypothesized that boinc was trying to read from one of the config or project related files in the boinc data dir and failing due to a too small input buffer

to test that hypothesis i decided to delete the files one-by-one to see if the sack smash error would go away, i ran the boinc command with the --detach_project URL parm on each project followed by the the boinc command with no parms, after the second detach the boinc command did not crash with the stack smashing error so i conclude that one of the data files associated with that project had corrupted and boinc was trying to read input from that file into a buffer that was too small

after that i re-attached to all the projects i detached from and am now back to normal

thank you watson, it was a right bit of detective work, detoured for a while by that RAM hogging app but we nailed the bugger in the end

sherlock
36) Message boards : BOINC client : who's smashing my stack!!???
Message 46622
Posted 6 Dec 2012 by doggybob
one of the projects I crunch requires boinc 6.12 and will not issue tasks to 7.* clients

Which one may that be and what is their reasoning behind it?


it was oproject and I say "was" because it seems they updated/changed server code yesterday and now 7.* clients work but it's all very confusing because one other volunteer claims he has been running 7.* clients with oproject for several weeks, on the other hand the admin claimed (up until yesterday) that 7.* would not work, now after the apparent server code update/change/whatever he claims he isn't sure which clients will and will not work! oh, and one volunteer reported (before the server update/change/whatever) that her 7.0.31 beta client received a message from oproject server saying her client is too old!!

oproject admin's English is not very good and it seems he either has difficulty understanding the server docs or has difficulty explaining to the volunteers how things are configured to work but he trys hard so i stay

on top of all that fun and confusion is the fact that the latest boinc package from the distro I run is 6.12.28, the 7.* versions from the boinc site do not run on my distro due to absent shared libs, yes my OS is up to date, so it seems the only way i can try a 7.* is to compile my own which so far has led to the same absent shard libs issues i encounter when attempting to run the standard 7.* client, i know there is likely a reasonable solution to this version and shared libs problem but I haven't been sufficiently motivated to find that solution so far as 6.12.28 has been working fine for me

the deeper i dig the more i believe this stack smashing thing is not really boinc's fault it's some other misbehaving app doing it and boinc is merely detecting and reporting the problem or something like that
37) Message boards : BOINC client : who's smashing my stack!!???
Message 46619
Posted 6 Dec 2012 by doggybob
this may not be a problem with boinc after all, i mentioned another big job i have running and it turns out that one is using 20GB of the 24GB RAM in the machine, i believe it should be using no more than 4GB but not 100% sure

could be that application is causing the problem and boinc is merely tripping over the mounds of rubble it's leaving behind... a victim rather than the perpetrator

i'll get back when i have more info
38) Message boards : BOINC client : who's smashing my stack!!???
Message 46618
Posted 5 Dec 2012 by doggybob
i searched all of boincdom (trac, this forum, boinc faq, boinc wiki, wikipedia articles on boinc and of course google, bing and other search engines for "stack smashing" related to boinc, "stak smashing" and several other likely misspellings and turned up nothing therefore I conclude the boinc developers have never heard of it in connection with boinc, possibly have never heard of it in any context other than "my stack of wine glasses fell over and got smashed" and have therefore made no conscious effort to fix it, so how can it possibly be fixed in 7.0 except by sheer luck? that is my pre-response to their response

one of the projects I crunch requires boinc 6.12 and will not issue tasks to 7.* clients, of course that doesn't mean I can't try 7.* but i'm not crazy about it, i'll wait see what happens after a reboot maybe it'll just go away
39) Message boards : BOINC client : who's smashing my stack!!???
Message 46609
Posted 5 Dec 2012 by doggybob
i tried starting the client with the --start-delay parm set to 120 secs to delay starting the science applications for 2 minutes in case one of those is smashing my lovely stack but it makes no difference, the client crashes almost immediately

if it isn't one of the science apps then it must be BOINC client itself, googled "stack smashing" and found interesting stuff from which I quote...

Stack Smashing is actually a protection mechanism used by gcc to detect buffer overflow attacks.


...which makes me suspicious that BOINC is a virus trying to attack my system.

of course the first thing to try when crap happens is a reboot but the machine is in the middle of a big job I dare not interrupt, have a few other NCI apps running and they're not having any problem so it seems limited to BOINC client which i won't start again until after i reboot or i hear some advice/comments/drivel from whomever/whatever

will google around a bit more, seems others have seen "stack smashing" outside of boincville so gotta be some advice somewhere

40) Message boards : BOINC client : who's smashing my stack!!???
Message 46607
Posted 5 Dec 2012 by doggybob
and why? i know it's not the nicest stack around but it's the only one i have so please don't smash it

doggybob@bone1:~/boinc$ ./boinc
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] Starting BOINC client version 6.12.34 for x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] log flags: file_xfer, sched_ops, task
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] Libraries: libcurl/7.21.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8o zlib/1.2.3.4 libidn/1.15 libssh2/1.2.6
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] Data directory: /home/doggybob/boinc
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] Processor: 8 GenuineIntel Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz [Family 6 Model 42 Stepping 7]
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] Processor: 8.00 MB cache
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] Processor features: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] OS: Linux: 2.6.32-5-amd64
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] Memory: 23.58 GB physical, 27.94 GB virtual
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] Disk: 641.84 GB total, 408.43 GB free
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] Local time is UTC +1 hours
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] No usable GPUs found
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] A new version of BOINC is available. <a href=htt////boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php>Download it.<>a>
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [Asteroids@home] URL http://asteroidsathome.net/boinc/; Computer ID 3469; resource share 10
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [NRG] URL http://boinc.med.usherbrooke.ca/nrg/; Computer ID 4328; resource share 10
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [climateprediction.net] URL http://climateprediction.net/; Computer ID 1252571; resource share 10
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [OProject@Home] URL http://oproject.info/; Computer ID 4656; resource share 10
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [Radioactive@Home] URL http://radioactiveathome.org/boinc/; Computer ID 4727; resource share 10
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [NumberFields@home] URL http://NumberFields.asu.edu/NumberFields/; Computer ID 8865; resource share 10
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] General prefs: from http://gerasim.boinc.ru/ (last modified 24-Jul-2011 08:52:45)
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] Host location: none
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] General prefs: using your defaults
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] Reading preferences override file
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] Preferences:
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] max memory usage when active: 21729.33MB
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] max memory usage when idle: 23902.27MB
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] max disk usage: 10.00GB
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] suspend work if non-BOINC CPU load exceeds 80 %
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] (to change preferences, visit the web site of an attached project, or select Preferences in the Manager)
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [---] Not using a proxy
Initialization completed
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [OProject@Home] Restarting task final-sp-14464_0 using shor-sp version 104
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [Radioactive@Home] Restarting task sample_1197814_0 using radac version 169
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [Asteroids@home] Restarting task ps_121130_121_264_1 using period_search version 10100
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [Asteroids@home] Restarting task ps_121130_121_283_1 using period_search version 10100
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [Asteroids@home] Restarting task ps_121130_121_126_0 using period_search version 10100
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [Asteroids@home] Restarting task ps_121130_121_290_1 using period_search version 10100
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [Asteroids@home] Restarting task ps_121130_121_289_1 using period_search version 10100
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [Asteroids@home] Restarting task ps_121130_121_271_0 using period_search version 10100
05-Dec-2012 11:29:52 [Asteroids@home] Restarting task ps_121130_122_38_1 using period_search version 10100
*** stack smashing detected ***: ./boinc terminated
SIGSEGV: segmentation violation
Segmentation fault

i've restarted the client 5 times and it just keeps crashing with the segmentation fault
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