Posts by Bill Michael

21) Message boards : BOINC client : Different platform_name for different projects possible? (Message 2426)
Posted 6 Jan 2006 by Bill Michael
Post:
So my question, for someone familiar with the core client code, is: If I can get ahold of a linux client, and possibly manually edit some XML files, will the client use different platform names for different projects?


Yes - you are using an "anonymous platform" and you'll need an "app_info.xml" file. You can search on these in the Wiki for more details. I would also suggest you get the Altivec-optimized Mac SETI application from Team MacNN and put it on your Macs - this will give you an example of the xml file needed, how to override the project's names, etc. Plus it'll double your SETI throughput on G4's and G5's. :-)
22) Message boards : BOINC Manager : Where do I change preferences for BOINC (GUI) (Message 2408)
Posted 5 Jan 2006 by Bill Michael
Post:
Thu 05 Jan 2006 06:26:00 PM IST||Suspending computation and network activity - user is active

I am now working, right?


Well, you will be (hopefully) when you've been inactive long enough to pass the time you set for that preference. You can always use the Commands menu to set "run always" to test things, then go back to "based on preferences" once you're sure it's working.

I never use "work only when not active" - even my slowest old machine is fast enough that BOINC switching out of the way only takes a few milliseconds, so I never notice it's there.
23) Message boards : BOINC Manager : Where do I change preferences for BOINC (GUI) (Message 2402)
Posted 5 Jan 2006 by Bill Michael
Post:
Did you select the project in BOINC Manager and hit "update"? Did the messages tab indicate that the change "took"? If not, quit BOINC entirely and relaunch. Messages tab should indicate that the preferences have been set from the project in question...

Only other thing I can think of is if 50% of your free space is less than 0.1GB.
24) Message boards : BOINC Manager : Where do I change preferences for BOINC (GUI) (Message 2399)
Posted 5 Jan 2006 by Bill Michael
Post:
All the preferences are set on the project web pages; "your account", "general preferences", there's a section for disk space. The most likely misunderstood one is "use x %", which is "% of available free disk space every time I look", not "% of total disk space". Putting something like 50-80% in there is not unreasonable.
25) Message boards : BOINC Manager : Thanks All Got her up and going Have a Good Night And HPY NY (Message 2397)
Posted 4 Jan 2006 by Bill Michael
Post:
Unlike the project sites, we can't see your computers here, so we can't tell much... Best bet is for you to quit BOINC completely (file/exit), then relaunch BOINC, wait a couple of minutes, select Rosetta on the Projects tab and hit "update", and wait a couple of minutes. (Rosetta's servers are more stable than SETI's.) Then go to the Messages tab, copy ALL of what's there, and paste it in here. That should give us enough to work with.
26) Message boards : BOINC Manager : Lost my statistics after 5.2.13 installed (Message 2382)
Posted 3 Jan 2006 by Bill Michael
Post:
I made a copy of the complete BOINC directory ( I'm running Windslow XP ) before the upgrade; can I copy the old file from there to get me going again ?


YES! :-) Well... almost.

The files are called statistics_projectname.xml (ie; statistics_setiathome.berkeley.edu.xml). If you haven't run the new version yet, you can just copy them over. If you have already run the new version, it should have created new files, and you don't want to overwrite those - you want to use a text editor (notepad will work) and copy the contents from the old files into the correct place in the new ones.

BOINC shouldn't have zapped the old files though, unless the format was incompatible, or the install locations were different. If the old and new statistics files don't look the same, you may have to do some manual editing, or just use a 3rd-party site such as boincstats.com to show you historical data (in far more detail and better looking than the stats tab, imho).
27) Message boards : BOINC Manager : Cannot get/send work anymore??? (Message 2380)
Posted 2 Jan 2006 by Bill Michael
Post:
Port 443 isn't in use yet. If it's going to be used, it'll be for secure attaching to only, as far as I know.


I haven't looked at the code, but are you sure? My understanding was that it was already in there for the "account manager" stuff, would send all passwords via HTTPS. I don't know if that means "only" to AMS, or if it means to "attach project" for V5 servers as well.
28) Message boards : BOINC Manager : Cannot get/send work anymore??? (Message 2376)
Posted 2 Jan 2006 by Bill Michael
Post:
As you're seeing the failure (total failure to connect) on three separate projects, the error pretty well has to be on your end, in the network connection. Extremely likely that a firewall has been turned on that is blocking BOINC from having access. It needs ports 80 and 443 for "external", and 1043 and 31416 for "internal" connections.
29) Message boards : BOINC Manager : Boinc won't login on my account (Message 2367)
Posted 1 Jan 2006 by Bill Michael
Post:
I am totally baffled by what you've done, or even what you want to do... "Select Computer" is for remotely controlling other computers, has nothing to do with projects, accounts, etc.

First thing you have to do is reconnect to your OWN computer. A total reboot may do this for you, or you may have to go to "Select Computer" again and leave everything BLANK and hit okay.

Once you've done this, you should be back where you started on that host - which doesn't sound like a problem at all. Do you have multiple SETI accounts? If so, do they both have Classic credit, BOINC credit, both? If possible, you'd want to merge those - see the SETI Number Crunching forum, thread "I forgot my password" at the top. You can (and must) have an account on each project you attach to. Just because it's running SETI, you can still attach to Rosetta using _that_ account.

Tell us what it has running, and what you want to have running, and we'll get you from point A to point B.
30) Message boards : BOINC Manager : [climateprediction.net] Error on file upload: (Message 2364)
Posted 1 Jan 2006 by Bill Michael
Post:
The "locked by file upload handler" part sounds like a deadlock; two processes running where only one should be touching that file. I would quit out of BOINC then relaunch it, see if the lock condition goes away...
31) Message boards : BOINC Manager : How best to deploy and manage BOINC to several computers? (Message 2361)
Posted 1 Jan 2006 by Bill Michael
Post:
While Win98 will work, there are a couple of things you should be aware of. It's not supported on all projects, so check the requirements before attaching (it _might_ work anyway, but if it's not on the list, there may be problems). And every once in a while, it will probably lose track of CPU time and claim 0 credits.

Unless these are unusually fast PCs (typically not the case for Win98 boxes) you should probably limit the number of projects attached to each, and I wouldn't try to run anything "large" like Climateprediction. Check memory requirements for the projects you're interested in too; many Win98 PCs are likely to be on the low side on RAM.
32) Message boards : BOINC Manager : I want to ask.... (I am a newbie) (Message 2350)
Posted 31 Dec 2005 by Bill Michael
Post:
Depends on what you mean by "in the same time". You can attach to as many projects as you want, and BOINC will share your CPU(s) between the projects, with the time divided up (in the long run, not minute-by-minute) based on your resource shares. If you have a dual-core or hyperthreaded CPU, then yes, BOINC will run two (or more, based on # of CPUs) projects at the same time.
33) Message boards : BOINC client : How should I assign maximum disk space usage? (Message 2343)
Posted 30 Dec 2005 by Bill Michael
Post:
But one slight typo: "1GMB"


Fixed.

Paul - should the "Running BOINC CC on Mac OSX" section in there just be deleted? It refers to the CLI...
34) Message boards : BOINC Manager : Message says "Not enough disk space", prefs say otherwise (Message 2342)
Posted 30 Dec 2005 by Bill Michael
Post:
One small question... if I'm siged up with 5 projects how to they sync my 'general' preferences... or do I have to update them all? (not quite sure how they tie projects back to each other) and it would be very cool if they all updated back to here (to keep our stats in order as well ;) )


This is my understanding of it: When your host contacts the server, if the preferences have changed, they are downloaded to the client. When it contacts another server, if the local preferences are newer than what that server has, they are uploaded to that server. Once you've contacted each project once, the prefs are in sync everywhere.

If "local" prefs setting is desired, I see no reason why someone couldn't write an external utility program to do that. All that should be necessary is storing the right values in the right place in the global_prefs.xml and account_projectname.xml files. I don't know if the sched_reply and sched_request files would need to be touched, they might be updated automatically.

Not sure what you mean about "updated back to here" - this site has no database for hosts, prefs, stats, etc., it's just the message boards portion of the BOINC server software, for "generic BOINC issue" support. All the stats from all projects are exported as xml and retrieved then linked by the various stats sites.
35) Message boards : BOINC client : How should I assign maximum disk space usage? (Message 2332)
Posted 30 Dec 2005 by Bill Michael
Post:
Furthermore, on your second point, I have let the BOINC client run without fooling with it for much more than a few days and it would not run climate prediction work units that were partly completed and were at great risk of missing their deadlines. Instead, it insisted in downloading a batch of predictor or setiathome or rosetta work units and then preempting the processors from running the processes at risk. And as those short deadline processes completed, it downloaded some more, over and over, and never scheduled the climateprediction ones. Only when I cut the check in interval to 0.25 days did I even get it to run one. But then it happens that a processor will go idle for several hours because it runs out of work.


It is known that the scheduler doesn't work "correctly" on multi-CPU machines, where CPDN is one of the projects. No idea when it'll be fixed however, but hopefully soon. The "workaround" is to set the cache size very small; you still should not have idle CPUs though, I don't know why that's happening in your case.
36) Message boards : BOINC Manager : BOINC manager on Linux won't control another computer (Message 2297)
Posted 28 Dec 2005 by Bill Michael
Post:
Have you put in the remote_hosts file? Changed the password in the gui_rpc_auth.cfg file? Most of the data is in the Wiki on remote control and ports; I know 1043 and 31416...

See Manage more than one client from one GUI and File.SelectComputer - Connection Failure for more info.
37) Message boards : BOINC Manager : Exiting with Data Left in Memory (Message 2292)
Posted 28 Dec 2005 by Bill Michael
Post:
Checkpointing is easy for some projects, and much more difficult for others, just because of the nature of the work being done. For example, SETI checkpoints "very often", because there you're running a fairly small loop of activities. Rosetta checkpoints very "rarely", because each WU is made up of only 10 "blocks", that are each started with a random seed. On a fast computer, the 10 checkpoints may each be 10 minutes apart; but on a very slow system, they may be over an hour apart. Short of writing the entire contents of memory to the file, there just isn't a "quick" way to checkpoint any more often than they do.

So some projects are much better suited to "intermittent use" machines than others. Rosetta _really_ does best when it runs 24/7, SETI is fine with ten minutes run-time here and there.
38) Message boards : BOINC Manager : Manage more than one client from one GUI (Message 2286)
Posted 28 Dec 2005 by Bill Michael
Post:
See the thread File.SelectComputer - Connection Failure - you need to set the password in the gui_rpc_auth.cfg file, and put the controlling computer name in the remote_hosts.cfg file (which you will have to create). References in other thread are to the Wiki pages on these topics.
39) Message boards : BOINC Manager : File.SelectComputer - Connection Failure (Message 2284)
Posted 27 Dec 2005 by Bill Michael
Post:
A comment on "RTFM" responses... this is a perfect example of one. Three people responded simultaneously. All gave links to either the Wiki home page and instructions on how to search, or links to _A_ page that would get the user started. Here is the response:

Wow, the response time on these boards is amazing.

Thanks for the links and the reading material folks,

You guys are great!


Now I suppose one of the respondants COULD have instead spent an hour or so writing a summary of the multiple pages this guy will have to read to learn all that he wants to know... but it just isn't gonna happen.
40) Message boards : BOINC client : Mac OS X: Can't destroy/create shared memory (Message 2283)
Posted 27 Dec 2005 by Bill Michael
Post:
I, too, am running the ARDAgent and AppleVNCServer, FWIW.


It doesn't seem logical that this could be it, but I would guess that very few people run that, and both of you do...


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