I was talking to Ardrid about this a while ago, and I now need some help.

I run a network of 450 machines most of which are P4 2.4Ghz, (yes i no, but they'll be used for a good use) and we want to run folding @home on all of them at night to help the common cause. But we need help in batch commands or batch control programs. We dont to have to stop a fold on each machine manually, we need a tool or the commands to enable us to do this.

You also need to know that this network is an educational one, and so it backs up at night, so we cant really have any server based or we can say bye bye to the AIT drives staying happy, but this network is reasonably secure and we cant have anything accessing external servers etc to control it as our router/ proxy combo wont allow it.

If anyone can help us please email me direct as we would be very happy to push all the machines into service for 12 hours a day.

As an extra incentive anyone who can help us very much will be rewarded with all folding team points being awarded to their team, as we will register as a member of their team. Let me see how many points can we get you with 450 machines running 12 hours a day???

Jake

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Main:
AMD Athlon 2600+ 333Mhz Thoroughbred | 512Mb in 2x 256Mb DaneElec DDR PC2700 | XFX NF2S-ALH with nForce 2 400Pro | Asus GeForce FX5200 128Mb Magic! | Creative 5.1! Live! | Maxtor DM+9 80Gb and Maxtor DM+8 20Gb | LiteON 832S DVD+-R/RW Dual Layer 8x | LiteOn 48x12x48x CD-RW | Full Black server case with 500W PSU | Relisys 17" Monitor | Wireless Optical Mouse | Logitech Surfer | XP Professional SP1

Server: Intel (Oh no!) 2x Pent

Oh [content edited]...I'm so jumping on this. Give me awhile and I'll have a solution.

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done a bit of tinkering with task scheduler -

it's easy enough to schedule a job to run folding at home. when you've created a job there is an option in the advanced proprties to have it shut down after a set time limit but this does not seem to work. maybe you can find a way? anyway a possible workaround is to schedule a job to start folding. then you can set another job to reboot the pc 12 hours later using the following command in windows xp

shutdown -r -t 0

i would imagine it would be best to use the command line client. save to a folder and then run it to connect to f@h and enter a username and team. once successfully started, stop the client. then delete the work folder. then copy the folder to each pcs hard drive. then goto scheduled tasks and create a new job. i've tested and it seems to run ok although you can't see it. but looking at task manager i could see 100% cpu usage so it must be working. once you have created a job on one pc you can copy it to all the others providing the path to f@h and the windows username and password is the same on each pc. scheduled taks do not work on windows accounts with blank passwords

you may find some other third party scheduling software to make your life easier or use group policy with windows2000/2003 server.

EDIT: pretty new to this folding malarkey and i've been reading up. apparently you can install it as a service with firedaemon following this guide

http://www.overclockers.com.au.../ser...new_updated.htm' ">http://www.overclockers.com.au...t2000xpnew_updated.htm

alot of work for 450 machines though

and there is no reason why it should not run all the time. it has no impact on performance.

http://forums.amd.com/index.php?showtopic=7380' ">http://forums.amd.com/index.php?showtopic=7380

We have thought about task scheduling, and that is the way we wanted it to be controlled by default. And we have also seen we can use the shutdown command, but we cant see that it will do in a desperate scrape. If we need to lock down the network quickly like if we have a virus we need to be able to stop the fold straight away.

Running shutdown -r as a batch command takes about half hour to finish sending to all stations.

Jake

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Main:
AMD Athlon 2600+ 333Mhz Thoroughbred | 512Mb in 2x 256Mb DaneElec DDR PC2700 | XFX NF2S-ALH with nForce 2 400Pro | Asus GeForce FX5200 128Mb Magic! | Creative 5.1! Live! | Maxtor DM+9 80Gb and Maxtor DM+8 20Gb | LiteON 832S DVD+-R/RW Dual Layer 8x | LiteOn 48x12x48x CD-RW | Full Black server case with 500W PSU | Relisys 17" Monitor | Wireless Optical Mouse | Logitech Surfer | XP Professional SP1

Server: Intel (Oh no!) 2x Pent

What about using something like MPI, sure the Folding program isn't MPI aware, but you would still be able to "mpiexec -np 450 <folding prog>" and be able to halt the programs immediately.

Just a thought.

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I actually was wondering the same thing as Jes, my college backs up at night also. I am writing a program that will start f@h from my server at certain times and stop it. All of the comps here are running 2k so it wouldn't be hard implementing the initial startup function.

The way our network works is like this:-

A company called RM (the biggest OEM in the UK) gets their hands on Windows 2000 Server and Windows xp professional and say "right, lets f**k this up so much that it barely works and so its very incompatible, and on top that lets charge huge license fees".

So we have to do things on this system in a very structured way. For example we cant just install an application on a system by opening an exe file. We have to build a package for it, that means build a clean station, install it on that, scan for changes, build package, analyse ACL changes, copy package to server, wait for propogation between them, allocate to network, wait for propogation on network. Then after that we can start using the apps!!

So it looks like we will just have to build a package with a scheduled task built into it, and then see if we can run the folds continually as suggested!

Jake

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Main:
AMD Athlon 2600+ 333Mhz Thoroughbred | 512Mb in 2x 256Mb DaneElec DDR PC2700 | XFX NF2S-ALH with nForce 2 400Pro | Asus GeForce FX5200 128Mb Magic! | Creative 5.1! Live! | Maxtor DM+9 80Gb and Maxtor DM+8 20Gb | LiteON 832S DVD+-R/RW Dual Layer 8x | LiteOn 48x12x48x CD-RW | Full Black server case with 500W PSU | Relisys 17" Monitor | Wireless Optical Mouse | Logitech Surfer | XP Professional SP1

Server: Intel (Oh no!) 2x Pent