Comments on: “Ich war noch niemals in New York, ich war noch niemals auf Hawaii, ging nie durch San Francisco in zerriss’nen Jeans…”

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

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.

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

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!

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

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

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

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