Have just reached 4 million credits, mainly thanks to concentrating on Collatz and Milkyway.

This blog is to chronicle my attempts to climb up the BOINC credit ladder with almost no hardware budget.
The office Quad is up and running (more on that later) on Ubuntu 9.04 Server 64-bit and one of my first steps was to install the Boinc client and get it crunching, I chose QMC as they have a steady flow of work units and there is no optimised applications to try and install with no GUI. One of the things I learnt a while back is the QMC have 32-bit applications, so to get them to run on Ubuntu 64-bit, you need to install the ia32-lib package.
Imagine my surprise when I looked on the QMC website this morning and all but one work unit had crashed. This is a brand new install on "server hardware" with good memory... this along with the hassles with the GeForce card on the AMD X2 is making me think that someone somewhere is sticking pins in a doll! My solution was to detach from QMC and attach to Rosetta and Einstein instead, if these also crash, I have problems!
A bit more about the new local server for the office, it is a cool running Q8200 with 4Gigs Corsair RAM and 1 Terra byte Hitachi SATA2 7200rpm drives in Software RAID 1. It makes a MS Small Business Server look a bit unnecessary and also a bit pointless ;-)
The set-up has been time consuming and I have battled to get the authentication working for file sharing for Windows clients but I am not sure how much of that has been caused by saved passwords etc on the XP machines and how much has been caused by me mis-configuring samba. Im also getting some 417 errors when client machines try and talk to BOINC servers and I gather it has to do with squid only talking HTTP 1.0 and not HTTP 1.1. The strange thing is that it works fine on the “soon to be retired” proxy (also squid on 64-bit Ubuntu). I can thankfully just turn off the proxy connection in the BOINC managers … but it would be nice to have again!
I have downloaded optimised clients for Seti and Milkyway, so as soon as the machine has been installed and is stable, I'll see what credit I can squeeze out of it!
The down side so far is that the Nvidia drivers for this OS only go up to version 167, so after some time on Google, I found a site that allowed me to download 180.44 drives for amd64 architecture.
As I cant take this machine down during office hours as I risk the ire of the Facebook junkies in the building, I am hoping to spend an hour or two at work over the Easter weekend and see if I can get it up and running... but have learnt from experience that these things are never as easy as they seem!