My ill-fated 9800GT has been limping along in a Windoze 2000 Celeron and has been experiencing a problem where work units hang after a period of time (usually 20 minutes to an hour). They continue after being suspended and resumed.
I upgraded the Nvidia driver to the latest 190.38WHQL version from the 182.50WHQL version.
So far things are looking good, it has been running a GPUGrid "GIANNI" for about 5 hours without the need for intervention.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Friday, July 24, 2009
More master browser ...
In trying to sort out the Samba server issues, I was using a Ubuntu desktop to try and figure out what was happening on the network. Things were being complicated by what I later discovered to be a bug in Ubuntu's Gnome version. The Nautilus browser does not know what to do with "smb:///" and as a result makes it look as if there is no browser on the network when you click on "Windows Network"
The URL "smb://workgroup/" works perfectly...
On the BOINC front, I have joined AQUA@Home as I am interested in the multi-threading idea in BOINC to use multiple processor cores for a single work-unit. An added bonus is their CUDA support for Linux. Just my luck, they are now out of work!
The URL "smb://workgroup/" works perfectly...
On the BOINC front, I have joined AQUA@Home as I am interested in the multi-threading idea in BOINC to use multiple processor cores for a single work-unit. An added bonus is their CUDA support for Linux. Just my luck, they are now out of work!
Sunday, July 12, 2009
The mystery of Samba and the Master Browser
In a Windoze workgroup you need one of the machines to be a "master browser" that keeps a record of the machines on the network and allows each machine to access this information in order to browse the "Network Neighborhood". The way this is done is to "rank" each machine according to its operating system (i.e. Windows XP beats Windows 98 and Windows 2003 Server beats Windows XP etc). If there is no current browser, an "election" is held and the machine with the highest ranking wins. The "Browser" service in Windoze handles this.
I have a Samba file server running on Ubuntu and it is set up to be the master browser as it has the capacity to handle more tasks and is almost always available. The problem is that in a mixed OS workgroup (Ubuntu/Win XP/Win 2000) this is not working and when any of the users attempts to browse the "Neighborhood", they receive a message that says they do not have rights ... Annoying! Running Wireshark revealed that the "__MSBROWSE__<01>" key is not set on the Samba machine or any of the others.
I have spent a lot of time Google-ing the issue and it seems to be a common problem but not many good ideas are around for resolving it! The usual "make sure your Samba machine is set up as domain/local/preferred master in smb.conf" and "make sure your OS level is high to win an election" don't seem to sort it out!
I have tried various options in Samba and the following seems to be a winning combination:
I have a Samba file server running on Ubuntu and it is set up to be the master browser as it has the capacity to handle more tasks and is almost always available. The problem is that in a mixed OS workgroup (Ubuntu/Win XP/Win 2000) this is not working and when any of the users attempts to browse the "Neighborhood", they receive a message that says they do not have rights ... Annoying! Running Wireshark revealed that the "__MSBROWSE__<01>" key is not set on the Samba machine or any of the others.
I have spent a lot of time Google-ing the issue and it seems to be a common problem but not many good ideas are around for resolving it! The usual "make sure your Samba machine is set up as domain/local/preferred master in smb.conf" and "make sure your OS level is high to win an election" don't seem to sort it out!
I have tried various options in Samba and the following seems to be a winning combination:
- Allow guest access on at least one share.
- A OS level of 65 seems ok but wont beat a MS Server Domain controller if present which is good (DC must be master browser)
- Make sure "global" is chosen as the default service.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
9800GT drags on...
I sent an email to the vendor that I bought this card from and he agreed that I could return it under warranty. I was planning to remove the 8600GT from my home computer and substitute it for the 9800GT while I waited for a replacement. In the two days it took to run down the work units on my home machine, I did some reading on a couple of the project forums and took note of comments by MarkJ and others that the NVidia Windows driver that performed best was the older 182.50 version. As I am approximately 4 days away from hitting my 2 million credit mark, I decided that it may be worth trying this before ripping the 9800GT out.
So far it has properly installed on the old Win2K machine (which none of the later versions do, they all miss out on dll's required for the control panel etc) and has returned 1 GPUGrid and about 6 SETI work units without a single failure.
As they say "If it seems too good to be true, it probably isn't!" ... but will wait and see how it goes. The next step is to try the recently found Galaxy software to under-clock the card a bit.
So far it has properly installed on the old Win2K machine (which none of the later versions do, they all miss out on dll's required for the control panel etc) and has returned 1 GPUGrid and about 6 SETI work units without a single failure.
As they say "If it seems too good to be true, it probably isn't!" ... but will wait and see how it goes. The next step is to try the recently found Galaxy software to under-clock the card a bit.
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