Linux BOINC

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SvladCjelli
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Linux BOINC

Post by SvladCjelli » 02-12-2004 10:12 PM

Hi Guys,

Trying to set up BOINC on my Gentoo box, and am already running on a few XP boxen also.

How can I automatically start it at boot time? When I add it to my /etc/conf.d/local.start, it asks for a project url and key... No problem when staring it from CLI, but there do not seem to be command line switches to add this info.

Basically, I want it to just start and fork into the background.

Thanks for any help!

EDIT: I have googled this pretty extensively, and it is hard to find any info at all about it.
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TABwebmaster
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Post by TABwebmaster » 02-13-2004 04:31 AM

I hope this helps for the time being. Maybe the Admin at Berkeley will include an automatic start script somewhere in the Linux client eventually.

http://setiboinc.ssl.berkeley.edu/ap/fo ... php?id=395

also, here are the command-line params:
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/client.php#cmdline

Mark

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Post by SvladCjelli » 02-13-2004 06:32 PM

SWEET!

Here is what I did for any other Gentoo-ers.

1. nano -w /etc/init.d/boinc

2. Paste code from http://www.dennett.org/boincctl. Edit Variables. Save.

3. chmod 755 /etc/init.d/boinc

4. /etc/init.d/boinc start (to ensure it works).

5. rc-update add boinc default (to add it to default runlevel)

It's just that easy. This should be added to the official Boinc dox.

Thanks TAB.

EDIT: This is not actually working...
Last edited by SvladCjelli on 02-13-2004 07:46 PM, edited 1 time in total.
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Dale O Sea
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Geek Alert!

Post by Dale O Sea » 02-14-2004 04:32 AM

Boyz, I'm not endorsing windoze :p here, by any means, but the above "easy" instructions are exactly why XP is my favorite OS today. When I put BOINC on my xp box it took about 3 mouse clicks and it was up and running. I know, linux is better, free, cool, the underdog, etc and I love it, in all of its distros for all those reasons but truth be told I have much more fun, a better eXPerience with XP. BTW, Micro$oft, (and everyone else) knew about the latest security issue/patch for 200 - two hundred - days before releasing the patch yesterday. :mad: That's why I hate XP.

Svlad, I know you and Mark and megman will have me hangin' from the yardarm for this, too but I said it. I guess if I spent as much time with linux as I have with DOS and windows I'd feel differently?

I wonder when will linux be more fun for everyone?

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Post by SvladCjelli » 02-20-2004 06:07 PM

This is not a linux problem, but a boinc one. It is a beta software, without adequate instructions, installer, testing etc...

BTW, try disabling your network access in XP and running BOINC for a day... can you say CRASH?

In Gentoo, once the installer is set up and available, all I have to do is type "emerge boinc" and my system automaticaly downloads the program, compiles it from source (thereby optimizing it for my specific processor and architecture - not to mention making sure the program is clean of trojans or virii) installs it and runs it automatically if I so choose without further prompts. That to me is much 'easier' than having to navigate to the page, download the software, open winblows explorer, double click on the exe, go through the bull****, and so on.

As an early adopter, I have no problem going through hoops to get stuff like this working. Obviously more people will use the win client at first, hence the more fully developed product for that platform. Go look at my computers on the boinc page and you will see I am running more XP boxen than linux ones.

What I always ask people is "how long did it take you to become familiar with winblows?". Until you have tried Linux for at least one quarter of that time, you cannot dismiss it as too hard or whatever. Most of us have been on win since win98 at least, so it is very hard to say that Windows is 'easier'. For instance, how hard is it to manually specify your IP in XP? In linux it is "ifconfig eth0 192.168.x.x". I think you will agree it is much more complex in windoze, and really an insurmountable task for any sort of casual user.

That being said, my linux box is still chugging on setiathome, but I haven't given up by any means, I will have this working this weekend, and will submit my ebuild for the Gentoo community (another thing windows doesn't have), so everyone will be able to use it.

Hope I didn't seem like I was hanging you from the yardarm Dale, but you expected some response I am sure.
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Post by TABwebmaster » 02-20-2004 06:46 PM

SvladCjelli,

If you have a few minutes I have a few Linux newbie questions.

Will that "emerge boinc" work with Red Hat and Mandrake? Those are the two I have installed.

Did you set this up yourself and, if so, (and it will work on Red Hat and Mandrake) could you send me a copy?

I was trying to figure out how to compile the source code for SETI and BOINC and end up with the executable files themselves but I never got that far. Is there a "newbie-friendly" step-by-step. I'm willing to try. I'd love to see what the differences in times would be with my AMD XP2000+ system versus just downloading and installing the Linux client from the BOINC site. If it can be optimized by compiling the source on each machine and it will make any difference in crunch times, I'm all for it!

Thanks,
Mark

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Post by Dale O Sea » 02-21-2004 02:04 PM

SvladCjelli wrote: ...Hope I didn't seem like I was hanging you from the yardarm Dale, but you expected some response I am sure.


Heheh, nah. I was expecting it...just wondering why it took you a week to ream me. :)

One of these days I will find a suitable distro, install it and give it the ol' college try. So far I've tried RH8 and Mandy7?, Knoppix and Suse. Of those I like Knoppix best because you didn't have to install it. Is Gentoo n00b friendly? It seems like a well recommended on. I've also heard good stuff about FreeBSD. Hopefully by the time I decide to do it there will be a more defined choice for me. Been using Windoze so long I'm not used to having choices like that. Now software choices is another matter...way more options for windows...

Svlad, while you are answering questions, re-answer me this. You told me of a spell-checker plugin for Mozilla, not for the mail app but for posting and text boxes. All I can find info on is for the mail spell check. If you could remember the link or point me in the right direction I'd appreciate it. thx D

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Post by SvladCjelli » 02-23-2004 10:53 PM

dale: don't remember, I googled it... maybe you can find the old post? I think it was in the brig, about security?
Will that "emerge boinc" work with Red Hat and Mandrake? Those are the two I have installed.
No, not unless you install Portage (a gentoo utility like rpm or apt-get). Gentoo is a distribution that is completely built from scratch (if you desire, and if you want optimizations, you desire :)). It is like LFS (linux from scratch - google it - very cool), but with alot of the hard parts taken out (so it is not as useful for learning, but is far more accessible). A typical Gentoo install includes bulding your compiler and libs from scratch, then compiling all of your packages (including XFree, KDE and Gnome) from source code (a 40+ hour install on my 2100+).

However, you just need to download the linux binary on the boinc site and type ./boinc (once you rename the long file to boinc), fill out the questions and you are rocking. This should work on any distro. What I was trying to do was to get it to run as a daemon (at boot time). The link in the first reply to me should suffice to get redhat up and running in this way (you use rc-scripts to initialize runtime programs, I use a modified gentoo version I have yet to conquer).
Did you set this up yourself and, if so, (and it will work on Red Hat and Mandrake) could you send me a copy?
Again, check that link to the boinc forums, all the answers are there.
I was trying to figure out how to compile the source code for SETI and BOINC and end up with the executable files themselves but I never got that far. Is there a "newbie-friendly" step-by-step. I'm willing to try.
It is as simple and hard as typing 'make world' after uncompressing the source code, but that is only if you have the necessary programs and files for this. Try installing the 'developer' section of your distro, then trying the compile again. Post specific errors and we can get it going (but it will not be completely optimized for your processor etc..., you will need to learn about GCC flags for this, or use Gentoo).

All-in-all gentoo is the best I have found, and I have tried all the majors (and alot of the minors). The support is awesome as is the dox. They have a cool set of bootable cd-roms Dale so you can try it out (as do almost all distros nowadays - like knoppix ya know), and Gentoo goes further and makes specialized free gaming CDs so you can see the power of Gentoo optimizations for your architecture (I believe they have a quake one, army men or something etc). [url]http://www.gentoo.org,[/url] and be sure to check out http://forums.gentoo.org.

Be ready to know linux 500% better than you did be4!
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Post by TABwebmaster » 02-27-2004 11:09 PM

make world didn't work in either directory after I decompressed both the source code files.

when I go to ./configure for the BOINC source the last line looks like this:

configure: error: mysql_config executable not found

any ideas?
Mark

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Post by TABwebmaster » 02-27-2004 11:16 PM

Also, when I configure seti_boinc source I'm not sure what I get but I don't see an end product for Linux. Perhaps I could give you a file that was created by ./configure and you could let me know what I need to have installed? I'm positive that I have the development tools installed (gcc, etc.) so if it's not too much trouble let me know what I'm doing wrong.

Thanks

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Post by SvladCjelli » 02-28-2004 06:42 PM

configure: error: mysql_config executable not found


Install mysql and try again.

You are not getting a finished product as the compiling process is bailing out with an error. Once all the dependencies are satisfied you can compile cleanly. You may have heard the term 'dependency hell', welcome to it :) This is what distros like gentoo aim to solve. Your distro is a 'binary' distribution, and is made to work with precompiled packages, so does not need to include all the compiling tools by default, hence it is harder to compile for beginners in these distros.
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Post by TABwebmaster » 02-28-2004 09:00 PM

Thanks, SvladCJelli!

This time, after installing MySQL, boinc compiles completely and seti does as well but when I look around in each respective folder I don't see anything showing a Linux build. I see a folder called client/mac and client/win but that's it. The rest are mostly c++, c, and header files

Any ideas? What should I be looking for to get the client running? With all this I'm only trying to optimize for my XP2000+ processor. The precompiled Linux client is working fine. I just thought if I could further optimize it it might shave off a few minutes of processing time.

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Post by SvladCjelli » 03-05-2004 07:00 PM

TAB: What optimizations did you use?

OK, I finally got the daemon mode running on my linux boxes.

Howto for those stray gentoo folks...

/etc/init.d/boinc

Code: Select all

#!/sbin/runscript
# Gentoo rc-script
# Date: February 13, 2004

depend() {
  need net
}

start() {
  ebegin "Starting Boinc!"
        cd ${BOINC_DIR} 
        start-stop-daemon --start --quiet \
        --exec ${BOINC_EXE} -- ${BOINC_PARAMS}  >>  \
         ${BOINC_DIR}/boinc.out 2>> ${BOINC_DIR}/boinc.err &
  eend $?
}
/etc/conf.d/boinc

Code: Select all

BOINC_PARAMS="-return_results_immediately"
BOINC_EXE="/opt/boinc/boinc"
BOINC_DIR="/opt/boinc"
files:

Code: Select all

/etc/conf.d/boinc
/etc/init.d/boinc
/opt/boinc/boinc (program executable renamed)
then a quick rc-update add boinc default to get it to start at boot, and voila!

Look out TAB, now I am getting my gentoos up on boinc... I'm coming! But seriously, you crank em out! Is that a quad-processor machine I see in your stats?
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Post by TABwebmaster » 03-05-2004 07:20 PM

actually, no optimizations other than having BOINC as the only process running. I was hoping that they would switch from the old FFT to using FFTW which would improve the speed of the crunching by a considerable amount, according to Eric Heien. He actually implemented FFTW for Astropulse but the admin at Berkeley are afraid that if they implement it with SETI@home that it will cause too many results to be returned in a short amount of time...thus bogging the servers down. Oh well...:rolleyes:

I don't have any fast machines considering what's available nowadays...I have one dual-boot WinXP Pro/Red Hat 9.0 on a P4 1.5GHz and on dual-boot WinXP Pro/Mandrake 9.2 on an AMD Athlon XP2000+ overclocked a bit but nothing major.

Mark

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Post by SvladCjelli » 03-05-2004 09:14 PM

exsqueeze me? For an example, I am running a 2.6GhzIntel, a XP2700+ and a XP2800+, plus I have 4 or 5 (3 just online) more machines, the slowest a duron1.3Ghz...

How are you whupping me so in the recent credit?

Also, the optimizations would be done when you compiled the source code, ie: -O3, or something like -funroll-loops... GCC optimizations. I haven't compiled from source yet, so not even sure if this is applicable.

EDIT: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1500MHz Pentium : I misread this as 4 1500MHZ processors ;) Next question, how do you get a pentium 4 that is only 1500Mhz?
Last edited by SvladCjelli on 03-05-2004 09:20 PM, edited 1 time in total.
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