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1)
Message boards :
BOINC Manager :
Mysterious error 500 still with me
(Message 2910)
Posted 1 Feb 2006 by Jack Gulley Post: Pinging 128.32.18.152 with 32 bytes of data: Means you either do not have a connection to the Internet or a proxy server firewall router is blocking all ping type requests. Try doing a ping 127.0.0.1 and it should work as that is just a ping of your own systems internal software TCP/IP stack. If that does not work, you would not be able to access much of anything on the Internet from that system. Then see if you can do a few trace route commands. These might tell you how for you can get out before being blocked. tracert 128.32.18.152 tracert 128.32.18.174 tracert setiboincdata.ssl.berkeley.edu The first is the setiathome message board server, the second is the BOINC/setiathome scheduler and the last is the upload/download server. These should tell you where in the chain of network routers you are being blocked, and most likely will be the first one at the company firewall. If that happens, then you do not have permission from the company to run BOINC and/or Setiathome through their network! You would have to take that issue up with the company IT department. The last command should resolve the URL to an IP address 66.28.250.125 before starting the trace route. If not, then there is a basic problem accessing the DNS servers. Your problem sounds like one version 5.2.x problem that is being worked on by the developers, but there is no fix for yet even in the test versions. It occurs with some company proxy firewalls that require a password authentication. One way around the problem is to set up an HTTP Proxy on your own system and have BOINC connect to it. Then use the HTTP Proxy to connect to the company firewall proxy using the password authentication if necessary. This has worked for some people. But may be a bit more than you want to try. |
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2)
Message boards :
BOINC Manager :
Mysterious error 500 still with me
(Message 2887)
Posted 30 Jan 2006 by Jack Gulley Post: company proxy. Can you do a fee pings of the following and tell us which ones work OK and the average ping time? ping 128.32.18.152 ping setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu ping 128.32.18.174 ping setiboinc.ssl.berkeley.edu ping 66.28.250.125 ping setiboincdata.ssl.berkeley.edu Ping -f -l 1428 setiboincdata.ssl.berkeley.edu If you can not ping all of them and get DNS resolution of the ones with names, then you most likely will not be able to work through the company firewall proxy router, as they are cutting off ping requests for some reason in an improper way so that PATH MTU Discovery does not work correctly. Then try the following Trace Route commands and see if they can reach through the proxy server all the way to the seti servers. tracert setiboinc.ssl.berkeley.edu tracert setiboincdata.ssl.berkeley.edu As none of us trying to help solve this type of problem can set down at your systems and run Ethereal network traces and hook up to the line on the Public side of your companies proxy server, there is not much we can do to find out why you are having problems. Which also means the problem will not get fixed for others who have the same problem. If you still have BOINC 5.2.x still running on a Windows system, can you try an experiment and post back with the result to see if it makes any difference? Use the program DrTCP to set the "Path MTU Discovery" and "Black Hole Detection" to NO and then reboot the system and test if it can get through. Then change those setting back to their original values Yes/No and reboot again. This at least might give us one small clue or rule out one of the minor theories as to what might be going wrong. |
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3)
Message boards :
BOINC client :
Resolving Computer Hostname
(Message 2790)
Posted 27 Jan 2006 by Jack Gulley Post: Unresolved host names are usually an ISP's DNS server problem. Sometimes they can be caused by your router if you use one. Power it off along with the systems and then powering it up, followed by the systems should fix that problem, unless the router is defective. But then you would have problems with other sites, such as posting on this one. You could have a Firewall program that has BOINC.exe and/or BOINC Manager blocked from accessing the Internet. It can also happen if you are using or going through a Proxy server that has problems. BOINC does not work from behind company firewalls that block programs from direct communication to peer servers on the Internet. It does not use the old HTTP web page method used by Seti@home classic. Some companies have proxy servers that allow programs like this to work and go around their firewall. It is also possible that Spyware programs have altered your DSN settings and are routing your DNS requests to some tracking company's systems which act as your DNS server. It might not know about the changed IP address of BOINC. Open a DOS/Command window and ping the servers. PING 128.32.18.173 PING setiboinc.ssl.berkeley.edu The first should ping OK. The second should have its URL resolved to 128.32.18.173 or 128.32.18.174 by your ISP's DNS server. If that does not happen correctly, it is not BOINC's problem. |
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4)
Message boards :
BOINC client :
BOINC Consuming Memory and CPU
(Message 2789)
Posted 27 Jan 2006 by Jack Gulley Post: Processors are designed to run at 100% and they all do just that. The "tools" you are using to measure that usage only measures the percentage of time the processor is running active programs and processes. The rest of the time it is in a idle loop looking for something to do. This idle loop time is what BOINC projects uses, putting it to good use. Because they are math intensive, these BOINC applications will generate a little more heat than normal. This is only a problem for systems that have heat sink problems to start with, or for some laptops. BOINC should not be slowing other applications down at all, unless they are programs like the BOINC applications that run only during idle periods. The only case where it might be slowing you down, is if you do not have enough memory in the system, and the operating system is having to use the disk drive swap file a lot when you run a program. The BOINC developers are looking into putting some of the ThreadMaster logic into some versions of BOINC for some processors. Will have to wait and see if they can do it. But unless a processor or system board has a way to slow it down, other than the idle loop detection, then there really is no way to limit you processor usage. Laptops often have these run slow modes, and some processors do this when they get to hot. |
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5)
Message boards :
BOINC Manager :
5.2.13 won't upload crunched data, must use 4.45
(Message 2774)
Posted 26 Jan 2006 by Jack Gulley Post: Any time I try to run from behind my corporate firewall... You must be stuck behind a proxy that does not know how to handle BOINC's HTTP/1.1 version, "Expect : 100 Continue" (or can not handle the BOINC servers slow responses to it) and is sending back the "Expectation Failed" error 417. And BOINC 5 currently does not know how to continue with the transfer, as it should continue it in this case, an aparent flaw in BOINC's handler. Hopefully this flaw will be fixed in the next version (or two) and it will be able to "work around" proxy servers that have this problem. Is there any way you could try other proxy servers? |
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6)
Message boards :
BOINC Manager :
I'm gone.
(Message 2766)
Posted 25 Jan 2006 by Jack Gulley Post: I don't know if there are really good stats for Classic of active vs. total participants, but, my recollection is that the numbers were worse there ... 5.5 million total, less than 500,000 active which in my book is worse than the 50/50 ration which we are close to ... On any project lasting more than a month, looking at or even using just the total number of people that have signed up is almost useless. By itself, it is only good for a PR headliner to attract attention. Sort of like the owners of the Titanic advertising how many passengers have signed up for a cruse on their ship. Not, how many enjoyed their first one so much they came back for a second trip. It does not reflect the number of people who have left, died, had systems crash, found it was a bad idea, lost interest, or got pissed off because it does not work from their location. Only the ratio of the number of people that have signed up to the number of people still active at a given point is important, and that will always decline over time. (Few people come back after leaving for an extended period of time.) Only the average rate of people signing up and the average rate of change of the number of people still active is important. Those can be compared. Are we attracting new people? Are we keeping the ones we have. New BOINC/Seti sign ups has slowed down, and the number of active has leveled off and is even in a short term down trend. Normal as a project gets older. Seti@home peaked in 2003 with almost 650,000 Active users and then saw a steady decline due to the age of the project and the publishing of the first "nothing even close to interesting" analysis of the first three and a half years of data analysis. When it was noticed that they were no longer using the results crunched and not updating the lists after 2002, but just storing the results data, people started leaving the project. This was the result of Berkeley's lack of interest in keeping the project going as an active science project, and just using it as a spring board for a new Distributed Computing development project. Now BOINC has replaced Seti@home and had become the focus of people who expect something that works, and are not the least bit interested in becoming testers of a Beta stage project that does not take note of and fix the problems. If they have trouble connecting and it does not work, where Seti@home did, it is not their responsibility to spend time fixing it for Berkeley. It is BOINC's problem to look into and fix the problems. Sure volunteers can try to help users, but they get little help from where it is needed and few if any fixes for the problems. Why should a user have to change their HTTP Proxy server that worked for Seti@home, just because they now have to use BOINC? Why would a user have to upgrade their router or Firewall software when it works with everything else, but not with BOINC? If someone leaves, I expect them to take the time to tell everyone why. If someone stays, I expect them to point out any problems they run into and complain when they are not fixed. |
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7)
Message boards :
BOINC Manager :
I'm gone.
(Message 2744)
Posted 25 Jan 2006 by Jack Gulley Post: Or just go away silently into the cold, cold night. A few must have proceeded him. Quietly. 982 joined in a day. Active users dropped to 189,121 from over 200,000 last week. I guess it evens out, some join, totals go up, more drop out, Active goes down. |
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8)
Message boards :
BOINC Manager :
Switch from main project to secundaire when Main is down.
(Message 2716)
Posted 23 Jan 2006 by Jack Gulley Post: To make this work, you need a secondary project that has both small and quick WU's and has a long dead line. If you use one that takes a long time, then you will keep getting into EDF mode and have to spend a lot of time on the secondary project. What BOINC needs is secondary project(s) support. No work would be downloaded for a secondary project unless the Primary projects are all out of work. And then it would only download one WU (or a number you set) at a time and when it is done, check the Primary projects for work before requesting additional secondary work. |
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9)
Message boards :
BOINC Manager :
5.2.13 won't upload crunched data, must use 4.45
(Message 2715)
Posted 23 Jan 2006 by Jack Gulley Post: There are several threads on this type of problem in the Setiathome boards going back several months. While some people have had this type of problem for some time, most having it now only started seeing it around the first of the year. So far for most of them, no solution has been found, other that doing what you did. For a few with older Linksys routers, updating the router firmware has fixed their MTU problems. A few have found deleting some BOINC work files has got things working for a short time. Others have connected each system directly to their DSL/Cable modem and got a system to work. Some have been able to find a proxy server that works for them. Problems found in the BOINC code within the connection logic did not fix the problems. The error messages in test versions all keep pointing back to "errors" detected by the LibcURL.dll that handles communications in the new version of BOINC. The problem is being seen by users of other Projects. One problem with getting information is that the users seem to be paranoid about posting tracert information in the forums (or don't know how to do it) or giving detailed information on their network hardware and Internet connection. Not that they even understand what all of it means. Getting any kind of TCP trace from these users would be very useful, but almost impossible to walk them through setting up and getting one. The biggest problem is that no one with experience looking into these types of problems as been able to get physical access to the failing systems, to see what is really going on. Most efforts have been trying to walk users through some basic checks using PING and looking at Message logs, and trying simple solutions to see if they help. I have been suspecting some sort of problem with delays in the Internet traffic causing LibcURL problems. But that would not explain why many of the people having problems have one (and only one) system that works, yet all of their other systems on their local network can not send data and get the different error messages. Its not a case of not being able to connect to the server, a TCP/IP session is being made. The server is telling them to send the data. It is just a problem trying to send data packets and.or get acknowledgments back. Part of the problem could be the servers dropping connections, but why would other Projects be seeing the same problems. Lack of support at Berkeley has prevented getting any information such as "is the packets of data even getting there" and what is the server doing with them. It would be possible to set up a TCP trace at their end and filter the IP address of a failing user. That would give some big clues, but would take a lot of effort and time on their part. Something the limited staff there do not have much time for. I was hoping that by now, one of the other Projects would have collected some useful information. So most efforts are on hold, waiting for a break and new information. |
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10)
Message boards :
BOINC client :
Network Problem: Error 500 at upload and scheduler request
(Message 2627)
Posted 16 Jan 2006 by Jack Gulley Post: Actually, its been an ongoing problem for a lot of people with many threads and many many posts about the problem(s). Seems there are many different problems that all give the Generic ERROR 500. Some people and systems have them, and one setting next to them using the same version of software, local network and path to Berkeley don't. Current ones are Persistant Error 500 issue / Redirects hit maximum amount and I have 3 computers - main one now can't connect and Interesting Post @ Einstein on upload failures and Mysterious error 500 still with me as recent examples. And there were a number of much longer ones. Some of them have been traced to very old firmware levels in Linksys routers. To "Black Hole" routers in your path through the Internet to the Berkeley servers. Issues between peer ISP's. The Berkeley upload/download server being overloaded when you hit it. Problems with using SOCKS Proxy instead of HTTP Proxy. And a number of bugs in the current releases of the BOINC application that are being worked on, and changes that will at least give more meaningful error messages about which of the many different errors currently just get called ERROR 500. Temporary fixes include Berkeley changing the network route for the scheduler server (but not the upload/download server), using proxy servers near Berkeley, updating older Linksys (home) routers, using much older 4.xx versions of BOINC, enabling Black Hole detection, adjusting MTU to a lower value, etc. while they test code changes in the BOINC Manager to see if they are going to help. |
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11)
Message boards :
BOINC client :
Feature Request: Project Specific Cache Size
(Message 2535)
Posted 12 Jan 2006 by Jack Gulley Post: Maybe they need an option that says, "get one WU" of work from project zzz when there is no work from projects xxx and yyy and I am idle. And don't mess with debits and such while it is processed. That way, when the project(s) you are interested in 100% of the time are down, you have a backup that BOINC switches to one WU at a time until your favored Primary project(s) are back online with work. It gets to finish in rotation and results sent back. Then back to what you want. This could be setup as an additional or Secondary project list. Items in the Secondary project list would be tried in sequence looking for a single WU to process because the Primary projects are all down or out of work, and all Ready to run WU's have been finished. You would have to have the ability to move Secondary projects up and down in the Secondary stack, so that you can adjust your preferences for backup. You would only want to put projects in the Secondary list if they have relativly short or quick WU. The big change here is the "get one WU" request instead of the get ####seconds of work request. The "get one WU" request can and should ignore all of the reporting and queue size calculations as it is just a way to get a machine out of an idle state. As long as the system is idle, a "get one WU" should work for any project. By not setting up a Primary project, you would be in effect telling BOINC to work like the old Seti client did. Get one, crunch one, send one back, repeat. With the advantage there is now a stack of projects to fall back on if the first in the list is not available for some reason. Minor problem for Dial-up users as there is no queue. |
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12)
Message boards :
BOINC Manager :
Mysterious error 500 still with me
(Message 2534)
Posted 12 Jan 2006 by Jack Gulley Post: I had to uninstall/delete the bonic folder to roll back to 4.45 to get boinc to work again. Just ran across this post that may or may not describe the same problems. 500 error No details of which one of the many error 500 problems. I have been looking to see what else I can find out about what he is talking about. I know there are some changes in the works to use a different set of error codes and messages that are more informative about these connection errors. It is just a catch all error that the server did not respond. But to what? And why? Nothing I have found so far explains why this problem starts on one machine and not the one next to it also as they are both using the same communications link and the same router. A protocol error would not explain this difference, unless is description left out a lot of the facts and details. |
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13)
Message boards :
BOINC Manager :
Mysterious error 500 still with me
(Message 2527)
Posted 11 Jan 2006 by Jack Gulley Post: One more 500 error Man, this problem has to be pissing of a few people and lots of people who have just given up on BOINC, not knowing how or wanting to access the message boards. Almost as much as it has those who have been trying to help sort out what it going on. BOINC detected the software change and requested an update of your Master File and got it OK. (So communications channels to Project servers is OK.) What failed is the attempt to connect to the Scheduler afterward. There could be some software Firewall problems or router problems causing this, as directly connecting to the modem often helps get past this problem. There could also be some sort of issue BOINC sending back information that the server does not like, and for security reasons does not recognize your current BOINC as a valid user. [edit]Oops, thats a company Proxy in your case. I remember reading that there are some issues going through some Proxy servers. There may be a problem here with the schedulers using to different IP addresses. |
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14)
Message boards :
BOINC Manager :
BOINC is a big step backwards
(Message 2526)
Posted 11 Jan 2006 by Jack Gulley Post: Actually Scott left out the most important step and its details. The same step that many Seti@home users left out and/or forgot about. That step involves collecting into a document, and then printing it out, that includes their account number(s) and sign in/up details such as date, e-mail address, web page URL's, passwords, etc. OR at least carefully writing them all down. Saving a copy of that document onto a Diskette and/or CD. Then placing a printed/written copy of this in a folder kept near the computer along with the diskette/CD, a printed/written copy of it somewhere safe in your other important records, and a copy of it next to your will in a safe deposit box. You would be amazed at the number of Seti@home users who never saved or lost their account number, and even forgot what their e-mail address was when they signed up. Or realized that changing ISP would have any effect on changing their access to their account. The second thing you need to do is get an overall view of what BOINC is about and how it works. Bit of a slog, but read the following two papers. It gives the best overview. A bit of grand positioning, but useful information to understand what is going on, how BOINC works, where you fit in, .... BOINC: A System for Public-Resource Computing and Storage High-Performance Task Distribution for Volunteer Computing When reading those, note the names on those papers at the top, as you might run into them or references to them somewhere in these or related message boards. Then address your problem logically. Try an Update of the project and then look at the Messages tab. It should tell you something about what is going on. Then go to that projects web site with the "Your Preferences" button and make sure you have changed your preferences to allow it to use your disk space (some require more than 50MB of disk space) and that you have adjusted your Days value to at least 1 day from the default setting of 0.1 days. More if necessary depending on the projects you have signed up for. Their web sites should give you some useful information on that setting. If you are just having problems Downloading, check with your software Firewall an make sure it has not blocked access from that projects Data servers. It uses different URL's and IP address than the Scheduler and Web pages. If you use a Firewall router (Linksys?), try connecting directly to the modem as a test (requires rebooting of the system to work best) and see if it downloads and that you can Update. Or try making a Dial-Up connection if you still have one as a backup. That might get you started, while you sort out the connections problems. You are not alone in having problems with this. Its not BOINC or the Projects web sites. Its something in between. |
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15)
Message boards :
BOINC Manager :
File.SelectComputer - Connection Failure
(Message 2505)
Posted 10 Jan 2006 by Jack Gulley Post: On the File - Select Computer, it might be worth pointing out a few things that novice computer users might not be aware of. Somewhere in the passwords section, that passwords are case sensitive. (My cat keeps stepping on the Caps Lock key.) That: With DHCP routers, the IP address of local computers may change after being powered off. (This may cause a lot of confusion after a power failure or the next day, when their list of IP to passwords no longer works, because a machines IP address has changed.) That: On Windows systems it is required that the default Networking settings for File Sharing and the Client for Microsoft Networks with its default TCP/IP Bindings be enabled if using the "Computer Name" instead of IP address. (Some security recommendations have you unbind the TCP/IP for your Internet connection from the Client for Microsoft Networks, and to disable File Sharing.) That: On Windows systems, to remove an entry in the drop down MRU list of computer names or IP addresses, it is necessary to edit the Registry for HKCR\\Software\\Spaces Sciences Laboratory, U.C. Berkeley\\BOINC Manager\\ComputerMRU and delete old or incorrect entries. |
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