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Big Apple: * New York City * (30. Oktober - 04. November)…

New York City, Spitzname “Big Apple”: 1924 machte dann der Sportjournalist John J. Fitz Gerald den Begriff in seiner Kolumne mit dem Titel “Around The Big Apple” über die New Yorker Pferderennszene populär. Im Pferderennspor…

Hi Torben,

meine letzte New York Reise führte mich zu Weihnachten in diese wahnsinns Stadt. Dass war sicher nicht das billigte Weihnachten was ich verlebt abe, aber mit Sicherheit das schönste. New York ist persönlich für mich eine der schönsten und gigantichsten Städte die es gibt auf der Welt und wer noch nicht in New Yorkwar, kann sich nicht vorstellen was dort abgeht.

LG
Karo

BoincPE seems to do excellently on my XP computers.

I now have some Vista computers. Does BoincPE work at all on Vista systems, if so, how do I get it to set-up. Do I simply make a copy in an XP computer and boot up the Vista computer with it?

Ob der Kerkeling auch schon in New York war?

Hi Torben

After a few power outages, and loss of some workunits, I think I might be on to something. Some Boinc projects tasks only take about 3 hours to run. So even persisting the data to a network share every 24 hours will result in some loss of WU’s. Also, you can never be sure the state of the data when the persistency service runs is a ‘valid’ checkpoint. Also when having several machines run their backup at once, it saturates the 100MB network. So what I have decided to do is eliminate the persistency service altogether, and instead, when mapping the network share, I just set that directory (the folder with the machines unique MAC id) as the BOINC data directory. And voila! No more lost workunits (even when power is restored, the last checkpoint has almost always worked, and no more duplicate ID’s). Also network traffic is much slower, and nearly unnoticable hard drive activity. Even when 2 machines are downloading new workunits, even the slowest hard drive can more than keep up with the data flow off the internet (very few people in the world have more than 10-25MB sustainable download speeds). Here is the main modifications I made to a couple batch files:

First is inti_boinc:

@ECHO OFF

REM This File is launched from PeNetCfg.ini (section [PostNetAutoRun])

ECHO.
ECHO Setting BOINC paths…
ECHO ======================
ECHO.

SET BOINCbase=%SystemDrive%\BOINC
SET BOINCclient=%BOINCbase%\Client\Standard

CALL setSysVar BOINCbase %BOINCbase%
CALL setSysVar BOINCclient %BOINCclient%

ECHO.
ECHO Processing Network Share Data
ECHO.

CALL %BOINCbase%\Persistency\network_share_data.bat
SET ERRORLEV=0
SET PersistDrv=T:
SET PersistDrvBase=Q:
CALL setSysVar PersistDrv %PersistDrv%

ECHO This system’s MAC addresses:
%BOINCbase%\Persistency\GetMACAdapters.exe
for /f “tokens=1 delims=;” %%i in (’%BOINCbase%\Persistency\GetMACAdapters.exe’) do Set MAC=%%i

ECHO.
CALL setSysVar MAC %MAC%
ECHO.
ECHO Mapping temporary share %PersistDrvBase%…
net use %PersistDrvBase% “%Share%” “%Password%” /user:”%User%”

if exist %PersistDrvBase%\%MAC%\ goto ShareExists
if exist %PersistDrvBase%\ goto CreateFolder

SET ERRORLEV=1
ECHO.
ECHO FAIL: Share %Share% does not exist…
ECHO.
goto end

:CreateFolder
ECHO.
ECHO Creating dir based on MAC address…
md %PersistDrvBase%\%MAC%

:ShareExists
ECHO.
ECHO Removing temporary share %PersistDrvBase%…
net use %PersistDrvBase% /delete
ECHO Mapping share %Share%\%MAC% to %PersistDrv%
net use %PersistDrv% “%Share%\%MAC%” “%Password%” /user:”%User%”

SET BOINCdata=%PersistDrv%\Data
CALL setSysVar BOINCdata %BOINCdata%

if exist %PersistDrv%\Data goto launch
xcopy %BOINCbase%\InitData\*.* %BOINCdata%\ /e /s /v /y /h /r /d

:launch
ECHO.
ECHO Launching BOINC
ECHO ===============
ECHO.
REM Start BOINC launcher

CALL %BOINCbase%\Client\launch_boinc.bat

:end
EXIT

Then launch_boinc was modified slightly (the new client 10.45 doesn’t like the switch “return_results_immediately”:

@ECHO OFF

start /D%BOINCclient% /low %BOINCclient%\boinc.exe -dir %BOINCdata%

start /D%BOINCdata% %BOINCclient%\boincmgr.exe

:end
EXIT

Next I moved the 2 batch files, load_boinc_data, and persist_boinc_data out of the “Files” subdirectory so those 2 options would be correctly greyed out in the NU2 Menu.

Also the restart and shutdown commands modified to remove the calls to the persistency service:

NT Shutdown command script:
@ECHO OFF

ECHO Shutting down BOINCpe now…..
ECHO ==============================
ECHO.

@%systemroot%\system32\nu2shell.exe -s

EXIT

and NT reboot command script:
@ECHO OFF

ECHO Rebooting BOINCpe now…..
ECHO ==========================
ECHO.

@%systemroot%\system32\nu2shell.exe -r

EXIT

So far (about 1 week) everything is working good, and I this will be much easier and cheaper in setting up a headless and diskless ‘farm’. First the main advantage is more consistent uniform network traffic, more reliable restarts in the event of a power failure. Also, the size of the Ramdisk can be greatly reduced, allowing the machines to be built with probably as little as 512KB of ram (256+256 Ram drive). The RAM drive is still needed to allow for the creation of some folders that WindowsPE needs, like the My Documents folder etc. What I did to reduce hard drive activity is set global preferences in either a Account Manager or the project itself is to set the “Write to Disk at most every XXX seconds” paramenter to about 600 (10 min) on all “slave machines”. This is like persising every 10 min, but only changing files that are needed, rather than re-writing and backing up of the entire Network Share, which is time consuming, and can easily saturate a 100MB LAN.

Cheers!

This is for Markcbq

There really is no such thing as a “XP” or “Vista” computer. Any system that will run Vista will work just fine with the ‘mini-XP’ that BartPE uses. Just be sure to use a Windows XP CD when building the image, dont use a “Vista” CD. You might need to put a driver for the network card into the proper folder in BoincPE before building it.