Posts by Alinator

1) Message boards : Projects : News on Project Outages (Message 49963)
Posted 23 Jul 2013 by Alinator
Post:
Well, that post was for the first outage when the server died. He managed to get the new one up and running by the weekend following his post, but it went down a few days later and was initially just a blackhole when you tried to connect.

So given what he said, I'm not really expecting to see much action until the first of the month, maybe this weekend if we're lucky.
2) Message boards : Questions and problems : Limiting CPUs per task? (Message 49674)
Posted 21 Jun 2013 by Alinator
Post:
Depending on the project/application and the multi-threading technology used, it can be done through anonymous platform (app_info.xml) - though that needs some care and knowledge, and isn't recommended for a general user.

I did ask David Anderson to extend the app_config.xml tool-set to include this, but he refused.


And now this poor decision is proving to be a problem over on MilkyWay. ;-)
3) Message boards : Documentation : Error in Release Notes for BOINC 7 (Message 48533)
Posted 4 Apr 2013 by Alinator
Post:
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Release_Notes

Under Installing BOINC/Windows.
4) Message boards : Documentation : Error in Release Notes for BOINC 7 (Message 48530)
Posted 4 Apr 2013 by Alinator
Post:
There is a 'Day Zero' error in the the notes with regard to running 'invisibly' in PAE mode.

In the paragraph:

"To run BOINC invisibly, choose the "Protected application execution" option, then delete the BOINC shortcut from the Start/Programs/BOINC and Start/Programs/Startup menus (locate BOINC in each menu, right-click, select Delete). You can still run the BOINC Manager by going to C:\Program Files\BOINC and double-clicking on boincmgr.exe"

... the procedure for disabling BOINC Manager from starting is completely wrong.

First, ever since BOINC 6, BOINC Manager is started from a registry run directive, and not from a startup group shortcut.

So for Windows 2000, you have to delete the boincmgr value from the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run key using regedit, and for XP and higher you can disable it using the msconfig utility.

Second, if the idea is to 'hide' BOINC from other machine users, then the proper method is to deselect the option to allow that at installation time.

Alternatively, you can delete BOINC from the "Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs" folder (or the Vista and higher equivalent), but then even the admin has to through the starting BOINC Manager from the program folder nonsense. I'd most likely just put a new shortcut on my desktop before I'd go through "click, click, click, click....." every time I want to start the manager. ;-)
5) Message boards : Projects : News on Project Outages (Message 47347)
Posted 17 Jan 2013 by Alinator
Post:
Anybody know what the story is with Leiden?
6) Message boards : BOINC Manager : How to set "Day-of-week override" to prevent network comm. on certain days (Message 26666)
Posted 18 Aug 2009 by Alinator
Post:
Nice but the moment the local prefs are entered via the GUI again and saved you get an error message i.e. from thereon you're confined to manually editing the xml. Certainly when trying and setting the Network based on prefs and this time sequence got:

18/08/2009 15:37:06 Suspending network activity - time of day

So that's a good work around to actually schedule something I wanted for longer, set the general to 24:00-00:00 i.e. no scheduled contact except only on Sunday for a time segment I wanted on a special client.

Edit: A nice trick to include in the advanced BOINC hackers BFS quide till BOINC does go the 'intuitive' route ;>)


LOL...

Like that's ever going to happen! ;-)

Thanks to TL for refreshing my memory on the workaround for this little gotcha.

Alinator
7) Message boards : BOINC client : boinc over nfs: too short timeout (Message 26665)
Posted 18 Aug 2009 by Alinator
Post:

Hi, thanks!

Now... this 30 seconds might be nice as parameter?


I frgot to mention: it happens often when requesting update:
Sending scheduler request: Requested by user. Requesting 0 seconds of work, reporting 5 completed tasks

It might be also corelated by number of WUs cached locally?

Maybe boinc is sending it every 29.5 seconds, so it is small time for error?
Maybe sending it every 20 seconds would help?

BR
Iztok


Actually, in 'normal' circumstances I think the CC sends a heartbeat to the apps once a second. The thirty second timeout is built into the app, and if it doesn't see a heartbeat in that amount of time it will exit.

You are correct in surmising the problem is related to the amount of work a host is carrying. The reason is this increases the amount of overhead the CC has to handle locally (disk I/O), as well as the amount of data which gets transferred back to the projects on every scheduler contact session (network I/O).

Those functions 'lock' the shared memory (the method used by the apps and CC to communicate), and if they take longer than thirty seconds to complete will result in the 'forced' exit by the app.

As a side note, if you use a remote monitoring tool like BOINCview and set the update interval too short you can effectively bring task processing to a halt with the network I/O overhead! ;-)

Alinator
8) Message boards : BOINC Manager : How to set "Day-of-week override" to prevent network comm. on certain days (Message 26650)
Posted 17 Aug 2009 by Alinator
Post:
What!!??

You mean this hasn't been addressed in all this time? Sheesh, then what's the point in having a day of week feature at all?

Now I remember why when I absolutely don't want a host talking to projects I block the sites at the firewall! ;-)

Alinator

9) Message boards : BOINC Manager : How to set "Day-of-week override" to prevent network comm. on certain days (Message 26646)
Posted 17 Aug 2009 by Alinator
Post:
Switch to the Advanced view and then go to Advanced>Preferences>Network Usage there.

To stop weendend access, just leave Saturday and Sunday unchecked. You will need to fill in a start and stop time for access for the other days (per the balloon tip).

Alinator
10) Message boards : BOINC client : boinc over nfs: too short timeout (Message 26645)
Posted 17 Aug 2009 by Alinator
Post:
The problem is that sluggish disk I/O (and other I/O for that matter) blocks the CC from sending heartbeats to all the running applications. When this happens the applications are designed on purpose to exit on their own to prevent them from running as 'orphaned' processes. The current timeout for missing heartbeats is 30 seconds.

The humourous part about it is the applications are doing just what they are supposed to do, and the CC doesn't realize that it was the one which triggered the anomaly by not sending the heartbeats on time (as evidenced by the log message you posted). You could reset the project until the cows come home and it won't help one iota. ;-)

Alinator
11) Message boards : BOINC client : Sending Deadline Info to Core Client (Message 26643)
Posted 17 Aug 2009 by Alinator
Post:
CCs are already aware of what the deadline is for all tasks onboard. That gets sent when a task is assigned to the hosts.

The CC will post a message in the logs about tasks which are over the deadline, advising that you may not get credit for it and might want to abort them. However you have to do that manually by design.

Projects already have a couple of methods of trying to reduce the potential amount of time hosts can waste on useless tasks.

The most commonly seen one is the '221' Redundant Task abort. What happens here is when a scheduler request comes in from a host, a list of all the tasks a host has onboard for the project is included. This list is checked against the BOINC DB and any tasks the host has which are no longer needed by the project and have not yet been started by the host will be aborted. The catch is the project has to have that functionality enabled. Most do, but some don't.

The other alternative is the project has the ability to send an unconditional abort to a host. However, AFAIK no project uses this feature except in extraordinary conditions.

HTH,

Alinator
12) Message boards : Projects : DrugDiscovery@Home (Message 26509)
Posted 6 Aug 2009 by Alinator
Post:
You can get most of the info from the host as well.

The Account Key (aka the Authenticator) is in the account_*.xml file, and the Host ID is in client_state.

Your going to have to rely on your own memory for the account sign up email addy and PW though. ;-)

Alinator
13) Message boards : BOINC client : 6.6.5 still ignoring no-new-work (Message 23038)
Posted 11 Feb 2009 by Alinator
Post:
This isn't a CC problem, it's a backend problem.

It looks to me like SAH Beta and GPUGrid haven't gotten around to updating their software package yet.

<edit> @ Ageless: Note the proper behaviour for Cosmo.

Alinator
14) Message boards : Projects : News on project outages. (Message 22923)
Posted 6 Feb 2009 by Alinator
Post:
Jord,

Did you hear anything back from Dave or Travis yet. We can only assume something really bad happened to the project backend.

They've been down long enough now that I have completed work waiting to go back which is over the deadline. So I am really hoping they don't just throw the switch wide open when they get it fixed, and use a staggered startup instead. ;-)

Alinator
15) Message boards : BOINC client : Problem with DCF and BOINC cache (Message 22807)
Posted 1 Feb 2009 by Alinator
Post:
Hmmm...

Check your logs closer. IIRC, when you hit a max task in progress limit you get a 30 minute comm deferral from MW, which will result in the effect you're seeing.

Given that the opti app is running about twice as fast as the stocker, the TDCF reduction is what I would expect.

Alinator
16) Message boards : BOINC client : Benchmarking bug - indefinite suspension of computing (Message 16141)
Posted 30 Mar 2008 by Alinator
Post:


<snip>

The BUG is that benchmarking starts, but doesn't complete. There should be no way that that can happen, period. It's called fault-tolerance, and it should apply even when the 'fault' is a naïve user.


It's not just the benchmark which has problems if you go farther than the next run time for it in the future and then back.

Everything stops for whatever the time interval was for the jump when you go back. The only exception found was that OS initiated DST changes are handled properly.

IOW's, patching it so the benchmark completes once it starts regardless of anything else that happens with the clock won't fix the problem enitrely.

In addition, my observations when I was working the problem with a different user over in SAH is the 'damage' to the time metrics is from the leap forward which created a big seemingly idle period BOINC cannot account for. Fortunately, when the jump back occurs it doesn't interpret this as miraculously somehow having amplified its computational abilities and set the metrics according to that! That probably explains why it resorts to just suspending everything until 'mystery' period goes away.

Alinator
17) Message boards : BOINC client : Statistics on Task screen (Message 14681)
Posted 5 Jan 2008 by Alinator
Post:
You get a few choices on what to display.

Total Credit and Recent Average Credit for the User (sum of all hosts) or the individual host.

You can also choose a few different ways to display the stats, and if you want to see them plotted for longer than the default (30 days) you can change a pref in the cc_config file.

HTH,

Alinator
18) Message boards : Web interfaces : Account data (Message 12937)
Posted 9 Oct 2007 by Alinator
Post:
LOL...

Nice thought, but...

Just think of the nightmare in trying to figure out cross project parity for that though! ;-)

Alinator
19) Message boards : Web interfaces : Battery & User Active Preference (Message 12805)
Posted 1 Oct 2007 by Alinator
Post:
Addendum:

It came to my attention the 'Run with When User is Active' global pref has the same issue.

Alinator

20) Message boards : Web interfaces : Server version numbers (Message 12786)
Posted 28 Sep 2007 by Alinator
Post:
It's OK with me, since it's a different backend issue than the battery prefs being broken. Although it does have a bearing due to making it hard to submit an accurate report of a problem.

The server should be identifying itself to the Client by its SVN Rev Number rather than the version number of the CC that happened to come along in the tarball it was built from. I don't see the problem with sending it to the client in place of the bogus CC version, unless it was was like 500 characters long or something like that. I mean even web servers identify their version for the most part if you ask them.

Also, I can't seem to find it (the SVNRN) on any of the server status pages for the projects I'm attached to and a dozen or so other projects I looked at as was reported here.

So as it stands a user/host doesn't really have a clue about what their talking to on the other end of the wire. Overall I'd have to say if you're not going to send the correct information in the contact session reply, it would be better to not send anything rather than the wrong information.

Alinator


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