Acquiring Satellites..

I setup the BOINC client recently on one of my ClarkConnect boxes and ran into some little issues that I can hopefully save others from. This guide will walk you through downloading and installing the client and preparing it to be controlled remotely from a computer that has the BOINC Manager in a GUI. It should also help if you’re not going to remotely control BOINC, you’ll just need to do a little research on your own to use BOINC from the command line. I assume that you have a little linux knowledge (at least file editing and navigation skills) and have setup BOINC in GUI mode before. Continue Reading to see the tutorial:

Step 1.

You should create a new user to run BOINC under for security reasons. You should not leave it running as root!

useradd boinc
passwd boinc
su boinc
cd ~

You should now have a new user named boinc and be running as that user. If you logout during this process or when you restart your computer and want to restart BOINC you’ll just use ’su boinc’ and ‘cd ~’ then continue on or launch the client.

Step 2.

You need to download the BOINC client. Go to the BOINC Download Page and scroll down to “Older Linux x86 and x64″ and grab the Recommended Version from that section. ClarkConnect seems to lack the correct version of some libraries to run the regular Linux version.

You have 2 choices for getting the file over to your ClarkConnect box. The first is to use wget:

wget http://boincdl.ssl.berkeley.edu/dl/boinc_compat_6.2.15_i686-pc-linux-gnu.sh

(You can blindly use this code if you want, you really should go get the current URL for the newest version though)

The second option is to use WinSCP. Here is where one of the little sneaky tricks comes in. WinSCP will by default transfer .sh files in text mode, however the installer is a binary file. Make sure you manually set the transfer to binary mode or you’ll just get errors on the next step. The errors look like this:

tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers

gunzip: stdin: invalid compressed data--crc error

gunzip: stdin: invalid compressed data--length error
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

Step 3.

Next we’ll install the BOINC Client. This one should be pretty easy.

sh boinc_compat_6.2.15_i686-pc-linux-gnu.sh

If you see errors and you used WinSCP please look at step 2!

Step 4.

Now we’ll setup BOINC to be remotely controlled. Inside your new BOINC directory you need create a file called gui_rpc_auth.cfg This file only contains only one line and that is the password you’ll use to connect remotely. If you have already run the client you’ll see a randomly generated password in the file already. I recommend changing it unless you’re good at remembering random strings of characters.

Step 5.

Now it’s time to startup BOINC. We need to pass it a couple options though. We’ll use -daemon to run it in the background and –allow_remote_gui_rpc to allow remote connections to the client. This option allows connections from any client, if you only want specific computers to be able to connect you’ll need to do some reading on remote_hosts.cfg. You still need the password to complete the connection, this is just a second level of protection.

./BOINC/run_client -daemon --allow_remote_gui_rpc

Step 6.

Now go to the computer you have the BOINC Manager software on. Select the “Advanced” menus and click on “Select Computer…”. Then enter the hostname or IP of you computer you just installed the client on, and the password you set in gui_rpc_auth.cfg. You should now be connected to the remote computer and be able to join it to projects or account managers jsut like you normally would.

To get back to controlling the local machine just click on “Select Computer…” again , leave the boxes blank, and hit OK.

You should be able to run ‘top’ on your ClarkConnect box now and see the project of your choice using most of the processor.

If you’re not already on a team consider joining the fun at ArsTechnica !

.