hi all,

at work, i have at my disposal four decent P4 machines hooked up to t'internet.

quite fancy putting folding on them for briskoda: *but* there's one problem.

these machines are designed to reset themselves on each boot: i.e. i set them up as i want it, create an image, and then on every reboot they go back to an as-new state, restoring off this image. they typically get booted once a day, then left on overnight. we've a solid month where they can get left on 24/7 coming up soon, too.

so, if i set it up with briskoda folding, and leave them on for the majority of the time, they can do some useful work for you. the question is, when they reboot mid unit, i'm assuming it'll waste the work done so far. how long do units take as a rule? if it's 12 hours or so it'll work, if it's days on end, possibly not.

these are p4 3ghz, 512mb ram...

anyone shed any light on this?

what do you reckon: any use?

ric

Assuming when you say "reboot" no formatting is going on, then you won'tlose a thing. The work unit saves every 3 or 5 minutes (can be set by user) so that if you turn a machine off, it restarts when it's turned on again from where it left off (at least the nearest few minutes)

Can you set up the Folding as a service within this image it reboots to? How come it just doesn't do a standard turn on / turn off?

If you can add it as a service, and a service which will come on every time the system is rebooted. It needs a folder permanently in C: (such as C:\FOLDING) where the "program" operates from.

Any probs drop me a line on MSN. I just can't fathom out this "image" thing mentioned having never come across it.

Oh, and to summarise four p4 3ghz machines would be the dogs ******. A very tasty addition to the team. Its just if you machines restore to some point when folding isn't involved you might lose everything - A traditional off/on or log out/log in will not lose anything.

basically these are some quick-and-dirty kiosk machines i've put in to give members of the public access to the internet at my work. there's zero chance of them getting it via our corporate network, so these hook up via a bog standard adsl domestic stylee broadband link. to avoid us having to babysit the machines/clean them/lock them down/be liable for the fvckers installing keyloggers and then other punters suing us etc i've put in a hardware device that resets the machines to a standard image on reboot: i.e any changes of any sort to the hard disk since last reboot are removed totally. they can do what they like to the machine whilst it's running, including formatting C:, and it'll be back to normal on a reboot.

what i'm proposing is to setup my default image for all four PCs with folding running as a service: so on reboot, they'll launch folding for briskoda and keep running until the next reboot - at which point they'll "go back in time" and start again - but *lose any local changes* - hence question about lenght of a workunit, and if any data gets sent back to the folding server midunit if you see what i mean....

hope this makes sense!

ric

Well, one good thing is those PCs are quick, so if you set them to NOT download work units bigger than 5MB they would process quite quick. However I still fear you would lose a substantial %% of the work done.

However, if they're usually doing nowt, then anything is a bonus.

right: all up and running. they're actually 4x 2.8GHz celerons, so not quite as decent as i hoped, but still not bad. all with 512MB ram.

they're signed up to briskoda under my name - have been restarting/starting them and it's running as a sneaky service, and the machines are set to turn on at 7pm if anyone turns them off during office hours.

guessing i'll have to wait a while until i can see how much they've been processing though?

ric

There is a text log file in the installation folder which, will show you whats been going on.

rig

guessing i'll have to wait a while until i can see how much they've been processing though?

ric

In the folder you've placed the folding service icon, you'll find a notepad file there called "unitinfo" which shows a %% of unit completion. Also, there is one called FAHlog (or similar) which actually logs when steps are completed and that. You can keep an eye on progress in there.