Update on reorganisation

Well, the quad server is up and running happily on Ubuntu server and all the features like Samba "oplocks" have been sorted out allowing clients access to the databases. On the BOINC side, this machine is crunching Milkyway, Einstein and Rosetta with 85% processor usage.

The machine that has the suspect 9800GT was tagged to become a Windows 7 machine however after three attempts at installing 7 (all ending in blue screens), I went for Ubuntu 9.04 desktop in 64-bit flavor. At the moment I have 3 consecutive GPUGrid work units that have completed successfully. I'm hoping that there was either a problem with the machines OS or else it was just a symptom of the hassles with GPUGrids latest work units (still doesn't explain the crashed SETI Cuda units...)

The latest upgrade is a 3.06GHz Celeron that has now been moved into out workshop area to run some equipment. This is replacing a rather temperamental 2.4GHz Celeron. As I was a bit concerned about heat in the case and didn't want to go for case fans ets, I opted for a heat-pipe cooled 9400GT CUDA card. I didn't read the specs very carefully and was a bit sad to note that it only has 16 stream processors opposed to the 112 on the 9800GT. I installed the latest driver off the Nvidia website (185.85) and everything seems to be up and running with little pain. I am a bit sad to see that the latest BOINC software doesn't have the option to run as a service (or am I missing something again??). While the 9400GT won't make a huge contribution to the credit total, it will churn out some SETI work units and hopefully some Milkyway work units (when CUDA work is available) in order to justify the power the PC consumes during an average work day. The other plus side is that it is the first time I will have the oppertunity to play around with CUDA/Boinc on a Windows machine.

It's official ... I'm cursed!

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 ;-)

• Ubuntu "Jaunty" 64-bit server - Operating System
• mdadm - Software RAID 1
• webmin - Web based config GUI
• samba - File sharing
• squid - Caching proxy
• havp + clamav - Anti-virus proxy for http traffic
• procmail + spamassassin - Anti-spam mail handler
• dovecot - Imap & POP mail server
• apache2 - Webserver
• mysql5 - Database server
• bacula - Backup daemon

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 end of the 9800GT?

I have installed a later driver, re-installed the boinc-client, detached and re-attached to the GPUGrid project and the majority of the work-units on the Linux machine are still failing. I am left with the conclusion that it must be a hardware problem as the card earned 160,065 credits before developing this fault. I assume that 24/7 operation is more than the Galaxy card can cope with in terms of heat dissipation etc ...
That was an expensive bit of hardware for a month's credit! To add insult to injury the vendor concerned has dropped the price of this card over $50 in a month, could be that they know there is a problem? I can't get the nvclock package to work as I was hoping to under-clock the card to see if that helps. I see other users are also experiencing failures on GPUGrid and SETI ... so will leave it for a couple of days and see if it comes right...

On the positive side the 1TB drives arrived for the RAID1 setup in the new Quad. Along with this is a GeForce 9400GT with a heat pipe and no fan. Hopefully this will last longer than the fan-cooled 9800GT.

Lost in the post

I received the case, motherboard etc for the new machine however the second carton of the consignment didn't make it (thanks, Auspost!). So, no drives or GPU. Hopefully they turn up at some point...

The 9800GT in one of the 64-bit Ubuntu machines is getting rather unreliable and is failing work units in both Seti and GPUGrid. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is as the fan on the GPU is still running and the errors seem pretty random. I am considering turning this machine into a Windows 7 machine so that I can run some of the Nvidia utilities and maybe reduce the clock speed to get some reliability. Its not overclocked at the moment but maybe running at 100% 24/7 is just too much.

Our ISP at the office has changed the way in which they scan email for spam and as a result we are getting massive amounts of it at the moment. I have installed a program from the Ubuntu repository called "POPFile" that catagorizes mail according to patterns it has learnt from mail manually checked. It seems pretty effecient so far!

New Quad on the way

Well, so much for no hardware budget :-) The company has just funded a new local server that will take the form of an Intel Quad with a healthy dash of RAM and 2T of disk space that is destined to be run in a RAID 1 configuration. A GeForce 9400GT with heat pipes is included in the order as I believe this card will churn through a decent number of SETI work-units without adding too much heat to the case. The ETA on this machine is the middle of next week. The IBM x-Series server will be retired due to a lack of space and the current local server will replace an old Celeron in the workshop area. The OS is going to be Ubuntu 64-bit (big surprise!) but I’m unsure of which version to choose. At this stage I am leaning towards the Long Term Service (LTS) release of 8.04 Hardy Heron as this is supported until April 2011 but am a bit concerned as I know the software RAID has been simplified in the later releases. I will have to do a bit of reading!

Windows 7 on VirtualBox OSE on Ubuntu Jaunty

While this doesn't have anything to do with BOINC, I had to comment on a bit of potential insanity I commited yesterday. I have been wanting to have a look at Windows 7 as we still use XP Pro at the office but dont have a spare machine with a DVD-Rom to install the Release Candidate on. I wasn't really expecting this to work but decided to try and install Win7 on my IBM x-Series using the VirtualBox OSE package from the Ubuntu Synaptic Package Manager. What I really liked about this program is that you dont need to burn a DVD, you can just use the iso file off the desktop.

My hats' off to the creators of VirtualBox, it all worked first time and Windows 7 installed and runs fine. With a bit of playing around with the network settings, the virtual machine is visible on the general network and the desktop can be accessed by Microsoft's Remote Desktop connection. I have also installed a trial version of the latest MS Office and a couple of people are giving it a test-drive.


Im now just resisting the urge to install BOINC on the virtual machine ...

Upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit

Today was the day and I upgraded my home PC (the Athlon X2 4200+ with 8800GT) to the latest version of Ubuntu. As I have messed around and installed a lot of junk, I decided to do a clean install instead of allowing it to do its own upgrade. I had a niggling feeling that getting BOINC and CUDA to work again would be a little bit of a challenge... and was right.
When the new OS booted for the first time, it decided on a generic display driver and as a result decided that 800x600 was the best resolution. Unlike the previous releases there was no option of just turning on the restricted drivers to get everything to work. I had to go and find all the NVidia drivers in Synaptic and do a few restarts to get X to work. Finally got the 180.44 driver on BOINC 6.4.5 (there was no GetDeb option for 9.04, so had to use the old 8.10 version which seems to work OK)
So, after about 3 hours we are up and running again ... except SETI appears to be down :-(