Seems to me that fully half of this thread is now not related at all to the topic which was reasons people avoid BOINC projects, and what, if any steps can relieve their concerns.

The initial point that some people run on operating systems that BOINC and/or Rosetta do not support is well taken. The resolution to that is clear, and it is clear there is nothing from the outside that we can do to relieve that concern.

I propose that all the entries since this one be moved to a Linux/Unix thread on the crunching board.

Consider it done.

The discussion of Unix/Linux porting that was raised here has been moved to this thread on request from the owner of the thread.

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adrianxw had a point which got lumped in timewise with another conversation that had emerged here on UNIX and Linux ports. Adrianxw said:

A recurrent theme I've come across in a number of places is the somewhat cynical belief that someone, somewhere is "making money/gaining patents/supporting the US military" out of the freely given resource.

This was true of course in the United Devices type setup.

Yes, Dr. Baker has pointed out several times that he makes the software available to universities and other researchers.

In fact, they've now added the phrase to the introductory paragraph on the homepage saying Rosetta@home is not for profit.

Adrian, do you think that addresses your concern?

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Add this signature to your EMail:
Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

Here are two more. I'm familiar with it solely because I'm associated with a local government in the State of Washington.

1) In the State of Washington, there is a constitutional prohibition against the gift of public funds. This extends to the use of public property for someone other than government use.

2) Also, in the State of Washington, there is an obligation for governments to retain and make all records open for public inspection. That is, if we have a file, we have to make it available to people.

I wrote earlier to the project, and got no response. I suggested that there are literally thousands of computers about the State of Washington that could work on this and, since it is a University of Washington project, there is no small probability of utilizing a large percentage of them. In order to do this, however, I need a legal opinion which states that this is not an unconstitutional use of public funds (presumably because it's a state project), and that there is no obligation for the government to maintain these records and make them public (presumably because they are work product, and the final documents are held by the University).

As a city councilmember, I'm always looking for ways for my city government to use its resources to best effect. I'm also always looking for ways to earn the affection of the public, and the fact that we can form teams can really help with that.

I can imagine cities having a freindly competition over which city/residents/companies can do the most for this valuable project.

If there is an attorney, preferably at the University of Washington, who has some expertise on this so that an opinion can be posted on the website, I would really appreciate it.

Thanks

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1) In the State of Washington, there is a constitutional prohibition against the gift of public funds. This extends to the use of public property for someone other than government use.

2) Also, in the State of Washington, there is an obligation for governments to retain and make all records open for public inspection. That is, if we have a file, we have to make it available to people.

Let me see if I understand you here. With #2 you are concerned someone might construe the Rosetta WUs as bring public records and therefore subject to archieve and inspection? Do they have a definition of "records"? I doubt that point would be a problem.

But #1, basically you are saying that we would need the permission of the state before you could use a state-owned PC for Rosetta. This is basically true for anyone that wants to use an employer's machine. So it raises the question, how would one go about getting the state to explicitly permit Rosetta?

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Add this signature to your EMail:
Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

Here are two more. I'm familiar with it solely because I'm associated with a local government in the State of Washington.

1) In the State of Washington, there is a constitutional prohibition against the gift of public funds. This extends to the use of public property for someone other than government use.

2) Also, in the State of Washington, there is an obligation for governments to retain and make all records open for public inspection. That is, if we have a file, we have to make it available to people.

I wrote earlier to the project, and got no response. I suggested that there are literally thousands of computers about the State of Washington that could work on this and, since it is a University of Washington project, there is no small probability of utilizing a large percentage of them. In order to do this, however, I need a legal opinion which states that this is not an unconstitutional use of public funds (presumably because it's a state project), and that there is no obligation for the government to maintain these records and make them public (presumably because they are work product, and the final documents are held by the University).

As a city councilmember, I'm always looking for ways for my city government to use its resources to best effect. I'm also always looking for ways to earn the affection of the public, and the fact that we can form teams can really help with that.

I can imagine cities having a freindly competition over which city/residents/companies can do the most for this valuable project.

If there is an attorney, preferably at the University of Washington, who has some expertise on this so that an opinion can be posted on the website, I would really appreciate it.

Thanks

This would be great!!! There are no problems with rosetta@home running on university of washington or city or state computers. It was running for a long time on the 1000 computers in the UW undergraduate computer lab, for example. I think your team idea is excellent!!

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I stumbled accross this old thread and thought I'd offer a few additions

Security: How can I be sure the program isn't searching my harddrive for private information?

I found this in the BOINC Wiki: Security but it doesn't explain how to protect your data.

Someone else pointed me to Trux: BOINC Security but it didn't seem to give me the warm fuzzy that installing BOINC is a safe thing to do. Keeps talking about exposures and risks and how you might not follow all of their suggestions and create an exposure.

I'm looking for something that would actually convince an IT director that BOINC might be an OK thing to allow on a company full of machines, and that explains how THEY control how things will run so that no exposures are created. In fact, something that says "If you're gonna do a DC project, do it with BOINC! ...and here's why". Does anything like that exist?

Personally the primary thing to mention is that the user has control over which projects they run; if they don't trust one/some/many of them, they don't have to run them.
Such things can be determined by community acceptance; for example which projects are getting the most CPU time from crunchers.

As stated in the quote, if someone is really concerned about proper security (which is never an easy or simple thing) then they can "lock-down" their machine by running boinc under a highly restricted account.
There are very rarely simple or easy ways (especially not by using defaults that leave a system in a working state) to make something perfectly secure as a default installation - most security requires user-intervention and selection/customisation; eg the user deciding if something is safe or not.

Hard drive wear: I mentioned Rosetta to a friend of mine that holds a few patents in the hard disk drive field. His first thought was that a standard PC disk drive isn't built to take the wear of being on 24/7, and actually being used.

I realize I can set my preferences to put a timer on how frequently BOINC writes to disk and reduce it's use. And this probably works well for reducing power requirements too, because I can set a high value and let the disk spin down and go idle for periods of time.

...but I was wondering if anyone has outlined how to size and utilize a virtual disk to bare the brundt of the workunit IO? The virtual disk could be on a mapped drive on a server, or a ramdisk or even a memory stick or something. But sizing it properly would seem important, and then how to get BOINC to use it just for specific files that are written during WU processing. Not for all the program code and input files that are only read once.

Most disks last longer if they're left on 24/7 compared to being on for only 2 hours a day (as an example). This includes disks in home computers, due to the fundamental nature of the machanics. A disk will die from thermal-stress (mentioned later) before it will die from wear-out. I've been through plenty of disk of many different types, and never seen a disk die from normal wear-out (excepting early failures etc.) before it died from thermal-stress.

Doing as suggested and setting the power options to spin the disk down and back up now and then will greatly reduce it's life, and doesn't save any significant amount of power anyway due to the relatively huge amount of energy needed to get the spindle back up to operating speed - the energy needed to keep a disk spinning at operational RPM is pretty low in comparison.

A server disk would be restrained by the same fundamental mechanical limitations, and flash-memory (eg USB-sticks) are only capable of a finite number of writes - besides the fact that they're generally slower anyway, so you might as well just use a regular disk.

The idea of using a RAM-disk is the same as telling the BOINC core-client that it can't write to disk very often - the data is stored in volatile memory.

This basically comes down to a choice between having frequent checkpoints, and reducing disk I/O.

If a user is really concerned about it, recommend that they purchase a seperate (smaller) disk just for BOINC. But they're likely to need/want to upgrade their operating system before a disk would fail.

Overheating: Same friend also mentioned that many standard PCs have undersized heatsinks, and will tend to overheat if CPU is kept 100% busy the way these DC projects tend to do.

A resolution has been posted elsewhere, I wanted to add it here to make a more complete resource for people to reference.

You can use the ThreadMaster to turn the CPU neddle back a few notches and basically NOT be used 100% of the time, thus leaving more time for cooling air to flow through the box.

The Rosetta requirements page points out the overheating problem, but not the solution or how to determine if this will be a problem for you, or what harm (or lack thereof) occurs when your PC overheats.

I appreciate your honesty and not wanting to harm anyone's machine(s), but perhaps it could be reworded so as not to STOP you in the process you've gotten this far in to, to participate in the project. Some will see this as a red flag, and not continue... even though their PC will do just fine.

this is certainly true of cheaper machines, but machines from quality manufacturers, such as Dell, are generally pretty impervious to this problem.

The real problem is with the PC, not the DC project, but I appreciate that this doesn't help those with cooling problems. I'd advise that people in this category fix their cooling problems in preference to using some kind of process/thread throttling - eg, what if the throttling fails? or they have a really hot day or something?

Most CPUs will turn themselves off if they get excessively hot to prevent damage. So random apparent power-loss (when the supply of power isn't a problem) is usually an indicator of a cooling problem. Temperature monitoring software can be used to get an actual temperature reading to compare to the CPU tollerances detailed in it's relavent spec(s).

As for documentation wording, perhaps a disclaimer-style thing, saying that this shouldn't be a problem for the vast majority, but some machines due to low quality or non-reputable manufacturers may be affected. In which case they should seek a warrenty claim or similar, in general taking the machine back to the company they purchased it from for it to have sufficient cooling added.

My point being that machines should be able to run at 100% capacity 100% of the time without problems (besides general maintainence, such as removing dust).
If this isn't the case, then it's a problem with the machine (it doesn't really make much difference what software is causing the high usage, many demanding apps would cause the same behaviour; such as editing a large image, video/animation editing etc.
Because most "home" users are just doing simple tasks, using say 5% of the capacity (such as web browsing) then manufactures are tempeted to reduce cooling, to reduce costs, to under-cut competitors - and sadly many people will go for the "bargin" machine, dispite the fact that you usually get what you pay for.

Power consumption: I read on another thread an estimate that a crunching CPU takes about 60 watts more power than a PC that's on but idle. Has anyone seen any reasearch confirming this number??

If that's right, then the incremental cost, 24/7/365 is about $42 per year (at 8 cents per Kwh). And if you live in Minnesota (like me) half of the year the electricity will actually help cut your heating bills (although if you live in California or other tropical clim. then the A/C costs must be factored in to the cost as well).

that all really depends on what the type of machine, the type and class of processor, and a few other factors such as how it's used exactly (different types of processing are more/less effecient in varying circumstances).
Even things like power supply units make a difference; they're more efficient the closer they are to 100% capacity.
If you've got one with a huge capacity (say something ridiculous for today's computers, like 3000W) but only say 5% of it's capacity is being used (150W) then the process of conversion taking place (again, due to the fundamentals of physics and that nothing is 100% effecient) then it's going to consume more power than say a 160W PSU, which would be running at ~94%.

For today's computers, however; 60 watts is reasonable, but it stands to reason that if something is doing more "work" (in the physics sense) then it needs more "power" to do that "work" in a given amount of time (compared to not doing the "work").

As for heating/cooling the building in which the computer is housed, that's down to proper placement of the machine.
As in, if you want it to have a heating effect, then placing it more centrally will be better, to get better cooling, placing it near an outside wall with a window that can be opened would be sensible.

Again, fundamental factors such as computers can only run within certain temperatures are a reality that has to be dealt with.
If it's really a problem then the user can set up a processing schedule for the summer so that the computer only processes data when it's cool (eg, at night, or during the winter only)

PC longevity: Will leaving my PC on more of the time, and running it harder, reduce it's lifespan?

For starters... what happened with your last PC? Did it reach the end of it's life? Or just the end of it's usefulness due to the bigger better faster more effect of time?

I know that from a chipmakers point of view, that with a multi-layered circuit-board you want to leave it at a steady temp. all the time (i.e. minimize expansion and contraction due to heat, by leaving it on all the time). And, therefore, microfractures between those layers won't occur, extending useful life. But is this true for the REST of the machine?

I quote agree with the sensible statements made here.
For example old machines (even 486's) can be used for networking purposes, such as NAT routers, firewalls, DHCP/DNS servers etc. to great effect.

From a technical stand-point, leaving a computer (but not the monitor) on 24/7 will increase it's life. As for running it at 100% capacity 100% of the time, I'm not so sure; obviously in some cases you'll reach wear-out (mainly of mechanical devices, such as disks) sooner, but these have such a long life anyway (we're talking decades, even longer with modern disks - I've got some really old server disks which are still running perfectly years after they stopped being used in a real server, this is because they were treated well and were always on (as most servers are).
As for electronics, I don't think it makes any difference as long as they're at a fairly consistent temperature, and don't over-heat. I see no reason why they'd last longer sitting at say 40 degrees all their life, compared to 50-60 degrees all their life, just as long as they're within operational limits.

Just to clarify a few points, other things besides electronics will last longer if they're at a constant temperature (eg, on or off 24/7, but you can only use a computer when it's on anyway, hence "leave it on").
Disks suffer from thermal-stress far more than wear-out, so turning them on/off lots will kill them quicker too.

However, things like monitors, due to the fundamental ways they work, and inherent properties of the technologies, suffer from wear-out far more (when was the last time you saw a monitor "blow-up" as it would from thermal-stress fractures? they usually just fizzle out and die).
Monitors only have a rather limited number of "on" hours, so if you consider their "lifespan" to be how many years they're useful and working (in general, including "off" time) then the less time they're "on" the longer their lifespan will be.
So in short; monitors especially will last longer the less time they're on. I'm not saying they should be turned on/off by the second, if you're not going to use it for an hour or more, then sure, turn it off, but if it's just a few minutes, turning it on/off lots over short periods will probably kill it quicker.
I'm also not saying that people should use their monitor less, I'm just saying that due to the limited number of "on" hours these devices have, they should be turned off when not in use for a reasonable length of time (again, an hour+).

As for power saving, a monitor is one of the biggest users in most systems, so the single most significant power-saving act you can make is turning off your monitor when not in use.

Network bandwidth: But our network is on the brink now! We can't add any workload to it.

For starters, sounds like a network upgrade may be due. But, otherwise, you can control the hours of the day and/or the bandwidth BOINC will consume in the General Preferences.

Let's say we configure a whole cube farm of PCs to allow network usage only between 7PM and 7AM each day (and we bump our General Preference for getting more than .1 days of work at a time). Do you know what happens? The PCs crunch WUs all day, each of them has SOMETHING completed by day end, and ALL the PCs try to send their results at the same time! Thus if anyone IS trying to use the office network at 7:01PM, they aren't able to get anything done.

Does anyone know of a way to tell BOINC to lighten up? "Hey, look man, we got ALL NIGHT to report these results...let's wait our turn". "Wait our turn" would be a solution where the PCs are coordindated by some scheduler or other signal (and if you're doing all that, then prioritize so the PC with no work left gets on the network first, and the one with a result that's almost past due is right behind him). But short of that, is there a way to somehow Randomize when each PC tries to jump onto the network? So maybe they each begin at some random time between 7:00 and 8:30PM, rather than all jumping on RIGHT AT 7:00?

As with most resources, the demand only increases.
This is especially true of computing resources, particularly network bandwidth (and speed too, but that's a whole other discussion).
Users are always wanting more, and companies are devising ways of delivering larger media over networks, such a audio and video (think YouTube and to a lesser extent Skype; although skype is more affected by delay, and doesn't consume huge amounts of bandwidth anyway, due to using rather efficient audio codecs, but again, that's another discussion, the real point is that skype is barely possible over a 56Kbps connection, firstly due to the bandwidth, secondly due to the huge amount of delay (latency) that traditional modems added to packet transmition - that's yet another discussion).

So as stated, if you're near the capacity limit, something would've pushed you over the edge anyway, it just happens to be BOINC in this case.

One way would be to enforce, or force a staggered start, either by giving each client a window in which it's allowed to use the network, or at the network level by only allowing certain IP blocks access between certain times.
The first is preferable, because you're solving the problem at the source.
The disadvantage is that administration becomes quite time-consuming.
Letting all clients connect between say 00:00 (midnight) and 04:00 (4 am) would probably work well, it's rare that anyone will be using/needing the network (at least not internet access) and the clients would exponentially back-off and sort them selves out. Obviously the window size will need to be adjusted depending on how many clients need to connect, if we're talking hundreds/thousans, then a more sophisticated solution is probably needed.

Advanced co-ordination could be achieved by using the GUI RPC function and issuing commands to groups of clients from a "monitoring" PC (or server).
a simple way would be to allow a block of clients access by directly controlling their network access setting (changing from disabled to automatic) then after a period of time, blocking the group again (automatic back to disabled) and allowing the next group.

For the sophisticated requirements described previously, you'd need to either integrate/co-ordinate with an advanced manager (such as BoincView) or probably write your own. The protocol spec is open-source afterall.

One method of reducing high-load would simply be to limit the bandwidth BOINC is allowed to use in the preferences.

I think something that's been forgotten is that the servers have limited bandwidth too, so even if you had just one machine on a 2 meg WAN (internet) connection, it wouldn't use the full 2 megs anyway.
Also by that logic, even if you had lots of boinc clients, you could probably safely have quite a few of them using the WAN connection together.

Other more advanced things such as QoS (Quality of Service) could be implemented to reduce the priority of boinc traffic, or increase the priority of user traffic (such as HTTP for the web).
This could be done many ways, either by classifying the boinc traffic based on type/format etc. (with something similar to L7 from the linux world), or more simply by destination IP address (eg the BOINC project's servers).
The former would be prefered because it has the least points of failure. A simple example is that IP addresses can change.

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Here is some feedback on the issue (from a company's perspective)

As I always thought, CEO is citing potential vulnerabilities problems. I know that BOINC science projects will try their best, with operating firewalled servers and signing executables on a non-Internet-connected PC, but I prefer to play it safe (especially since modern OSes make it easy).

QUOTE - source

[snip]

Anybody have any similar experiences? Any suggestions how I might politely address these concerns?"

I've had a few cases of people using the "security wild-card" (for those that don't know the joke, "it's a security risk" is used when no valid reason can be given). Even when I went into the details of the security measures, which proved their "concerns" invalid, they still wouldn't budge.

Unfortunetly companies are ruthless these days, anything that even hints at requiring time/money and isn't critically needed is pushed aside.
Even when I've approached charities and non-profits along the lines of "helping out other non-profits" etc. they're still not interested.
This has been the same with educational institutions too, such as local schools/colleges (which where I live adds up to a few thousand (modern) computers!)

As much as I'd like to see BOINC (or something similar) adopted by most of the worlds computers, I have doubts that it will be achieved because it's just another "hassle" to most people (dispite the benifit they'll directly receive from something like medical research).

Even getting people to switch from internet explorer to something better (usually firefox or opera) has proved difficult, even when my main point has been security and showing people how badly infected their computers are (usually due to IE) with malware scanning software.

I don't mean to be pesimistic, but it just seems that unless you're going to change the fundamental nature of people (as in, making them want to do it) you're going to be hard-pressed to get very far.

One way of showing this trend in history is that scientific projects have always had virtually no budget (no funding). If people really wanted to make a difference, then surely they'd donate to such projects?
But as we've seen, this hasn't happened, and even recent projects are still being run on minimal budgets to the point of reducing their effectiveness, or quality of results, which i personally find rather disapointing.

As has been stated before, we do it because we want to. For myself this is entirely true, I believe in the greater good, and the little cost to me for running DC projects is trivial compared to the huge benefit that can be gained.
But that remains my personal view, and no matter how much I believe something is a worthy cause it doesn't change other people's opinions.

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Boinc security on Windows
Vista has many security layers and a regular user is not an administrator. Furthermore you have UAC with which you can control any admin operations and system changes. So Vista runs Boinc in a kind of "sandbox" too.

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Lee, I think part of the security concern is that as an administrator of a corporate network of PCs, you want the choice of project selection to be YOURS, and not the choice of your user base.

BOINC enhancements now offer relief to two issues:

Heat - You can now define a fraction of CPU % to run BOINC. Running at 80% of CPU rather then 100% can make a lot of difference on fan speed and heat.

Network bandwidth - You can now define and limit upload and download bandwidth that BOINC is allowed to use. It basically sends or received a 16k frame and then waits a number of seconds to achieve the desired lower bandwidth. QoS would be a better approach, establishing priorities on traffic. But short of that, you can just have BOINC use a low transmission speed to avoid it taking any significant % of network bandwidth at any given time.

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Add this signature to your EMail:
Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

I'm looking for info on security with Rosetta/BOINC and this is the only page referencing it. I installed it a week or so a go and just let it run. Last night I selected some link in the interface and wound up looking at my IP. Not the one the rest of the world sees but the one in here behind that one. A link to "Real IP" shows the IP everyone sees normally. I don't know how a lot of this works but I wonder how safe is I with inside the LAN sitting out there on Rosetta's server?

I'm looking for info on security with Rosetta/BOINC and this is the only page referencing it. I installed it a week or so a go and just let it run. Last night I selected some link in the interface and wound up looking at my IP. Not the one the rest of the world sees but the one in here behind that one. A link to "Real IP" shows the IP everyone sees normally. I don't know how a lot of this works but I wonder how safe is I with inside the LAN sitting out there on Rosetta's server?

Only you can see your IP and host name. Click on my screen name and you'll see what other people can see.

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Kathryn :o)
The BOINC FAQ Service
The Unofficial BOINC Wiki
The Trac System
More BOINC information than you can shake a stick of RAM at.

Thanks for the info...

I find that when i try to convince people, computer illiterate people at least, to install boinc, they are generally reluctant because of an unspecified fear that it will kill the computer or that they wont be able to handle the program.
An example of this would be when I asked to install it on my grandmothers PC. At first she seemed to think it was great, but I made the mistake of saying "if it gives you any trouble, you can just call me..." Although i told her it runs by itself, and she doesn't have to do anything to it, she completely refused after i mentioned the unlikely prospect of 'trouble.'
Sorry if this has been covered all ready, i haven't read the whole thread.

Actually something I have noticed on a personal level is that when you leave the PC run 24/7 it seems to operate better as opposed to cold starting it. So to me it is more beneficial to leave it on and contribute to a project of choice rather than the latter.

Also with the overheating issues I would like to say that it is problematic at best to ask people to download a seperate program such as threadmaster to minimize any potential overheating issues. I think that perhaps a better solution would be to merge this idea with the BOINC program, or project preferences itself. I mean the average Joe PC user is likely not going to want to become that deeply involved with a project to that degree. BOINC IMO should be the be all, do all 1 stop shop.. Again MO's.

Power consumption is minimal for these newer advanced systems. The average power supply rates at about 200-1000 WATTS. The 350 WATT PSU is about on par with running 6 60 WATT bulbs. To me that is not too taxing on an average electric bill, depending of course on how many PC's one uses and the amount of time run.

Security should always be a priority with projects, from the email address' to the BOINC client itself. Project leadership should not overlook this at all, the moment something nasty is found with either the BOINC client, or the project WU's it is over. I personally would not look favorably upon a lax attitude in this area.

Network bandwidth only matters to dialup users, as I have graduated to the better broadband movement I have found this issue to be non-existent anymore. Lastly the hard disk drive problems can be solved with the prefrences as was stated before. Although what I opted to do when building my almighty cruncher was I decided on a server class HDD, one which is designed for heavy usage.

Just adding ideas and ranting / rambling as usual. :)

Antony

...
Also with the overheating issues I would like to say that it is problematic at best to ask people to download a seperate program such as threadmaster to minimize any potential overheating issues. I think that perhaps a better solution would be to merge this idea with the BOINC program, or project preferences itself. I mean the average Joe PC user is likely not going to want to become that deeply involved with a project to that degree. BOINC IMO should be the be all, do all 1 stop shop.. Again MO's...

Antony.

There is currently a CPU throttling feature in the latest release version of BOINC (versions greater than 5.6 have it).

Look in your general preferences on the web.

Use at most
Enforced by version 5.6 and greater 100 percent of CPU time


Note that its granularity is very rough. It checks in 1 second increments. So 50% throttling is 1 second on 1 second off.
See the FAQ for details.

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Kathryn :o)
The BOINC FAQ Service
The Unofficial BOINC Wiki
The Trac System
More BOINC information than you can shake a stick of RAM at.

It doesn't seem to matter what I put in as a search term I always come up with this page in the results...
Unfriendliness. The BOINC application is as inscrutable as an MS error message and comes with no "OK" button. There is no "Help" or user manual. Like Linux there are pages and pages of links everywhere. I've got it running on three machines. The last one I've added has been a case of constantly reading pages of links in order to find an answer to the myriad of problems and oddities. All three machines are running same operating system, same firewall and same BOINC client. This later item is due to the fact that third machine was problematic and I noticed the client version was later. I updated the other two and they run fine still (the server now shows them as duplicates and Merge doesn't work...)
The program is complicated and not user friendly. I do re-installs and installations for people who know how to use the applications because of their work or study. I can install most things and work out if it is function as intended but as for using them... I don't have a clue. Most people are astonished to see their BIOS or Windows directory. I tried BOINC a couple of years ago and gave up after a month. Today I woke up BOINC couldn't find the net, the other two machines just chugging along fine. Firefox on all three find whatever I point it at and on the troubled machine seemed to have pointed it out to BOINC as the error had disappeared. Yesterday I clicked the tray icon of BOINC and ZAPro says Spoolsv.exe is trying to access the internet..? I deny it. BOINC won't come up. I figure its something to do with loopback so I allow 127.0.0.1 Have to reboot the machine after which BOINC works OK for awhile then ZA tells me screensaver is trying to access the internet. The first morning after I'd installed it I woke up to a similar message from ZA plus one from BOINC saying I should re-install and set it to load at boot. There's no Help or User Manual. I had intended to put five machines on Rosetta and go back to carving and screenprinting which I've done little of since I got me first computer about four years ago... but I think two will do as I haven't the patience. There's no help or user manual so why bother? I've had malaria three times.... and I'm in a bad mood after reading pages of links all day...

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Fuzzy burn , the ZAPro and other quite paranoid software firewalls will always come up with messages for any program the relies heavily on networks.
Given the ZAPro triggers on version updates of Rosetta or similar project applications auto update to make your life easier (boinc itself doesn't yet though). Other then defining in ZA that it shouldn't trigger on programs in the BOINC folders (if you can or similar) you will always get it with ZA. That just ZA doing it's job, not BOINC causing a problem.

Remove ZA and all the problems you having go away.

But the program is not pretty, particularly friendly and misses a lot of what Windows people are used to. But then that is one problem of making the program cross platform and not targetting it specifically at Windows. Help is online, though not layed out in a nice easy help file or 'folder orientated way' but they hopefully will get around to improving that if they move fully to their new systems (note there are not many people developing 'boinc' in itself. There are more projects using boinc than people developing it :(

If you get bored pop to the Windows lead developers site http://www.romwnet.org/ though he's not been posting to it lately.


P.S. spoolsv.exe is a printing process (printers, fax, pdf creating etc..) nothing to do with boinc. If it's asking for internet access (not local lan access) then block it as it may be a trojan hiding as the service. What AV program do you use ?

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Team mauisun.org

personally zone alarm is a joke
i find some nice software from comodo for both firewall and malware protection to be more user friendly and much more informative of what application is try to do what. such as requests from a program within firefox to be launched, it tells you what program it is that it doesn't know and what program is requesting that program to be launched. i use this with avg free and ive got all my security bases covered. on occasion i go use the online version of housecall to check things and always come up clean.

BOINC does not cause any trouble once comodo learns it. Any upgrades that I might do to BOINC have to be registered with comodo, but once that happens its happy.

I think the reason some people avoid BOINC projects is that they are over paranoid about what they perceive to be a problem created by BOINC. You are at more risk downloading videos or freeware and general web surfing than you are from getting any sort of virus from a BOINC project. The computer illiterate just need a little convincing from people that the BOINC projects are safe and that just about any computer can handle a BOINC project.

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Well BOINC projects that have some credentials.

Anyone can set a BOINC project up. Trojan@Home, FoolsRYou@BOINC or similar :D
and the application could be anything it want's
But if it's a trusted project i.w. don't just jump on any small project unless you can verify the background. Or, only attach to project on the Attach to Wizzard list. Then you should be pretty safe.

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Team mauisun.org