Folding without connection?

TheLostSwede

I have been thinking of this lately and i know it´s tough to get it to work. But wouldn´t it be possible if i downloaded a core and a wu without actually starting it, save it on a floppy and move it over to the pc that isn´t connected? When the wu or wu´s are done, save all those files on a floppy, and send it with a pc that is connected?

I have a couple of Dual Xeon´s @ work that only is being used as a Solitare slave which is pissing me off bigtime.

Can i use 4 instanses on EACH cpu or is it just 4 per actual machine? If i could use 4 on each cpu, i wouldn´t have to check those machines more than perhaps twice a week at the maximum.

TIA

Mac

TBonZ

Yes, it is possible. The best way to achieve this would be to setup a seperate instance on your connected computer but give it a machine ID other than what you already have on that machine. Once a new WU comes down to you, stop the client and copy the files to disk, transfer to the unconnected computer and execute. Upon completion, transfer the files back and overwrite all that's in the original directory in which you d'loaded the WU from. Re-excute the client to send the WU in and d'load another for transfer and so on and so forth.

The files in the "work" folder can get pretty hefty though and you may have to use multiple floppies if they can't be zipped to fit.

You could setup 4 clients for each xeon (2 per cpu) but with only 4 machine ID's possible for each computer, you would have to setup up these "transfer" directories spread over a couple of machines to prevent having duplicate WU's being assigned.

Hope you get what I'm saying.

TheLostSwede

Perfectly Terry, thanks!

For once, I was almost right.

mmonnin

The reason why you have to set it up on a computer with the net is because it needs a user ID which comes from the server. Otherwise the computer with no net will just sit there asking for one.

MikeP928

Someone who does those kind of file transfers often might want to try purchasing (or borrowing ) one of those USB memory dongle thingies (Thumbdrive?, etc) and doing away with the agonizingly slow floppy transfers. It would also make it alot easier to conceal the evidence if caught in the act .

Just have to check for OS compatibility, but should work otherwise... OR, and I don't know if this will work or not... how about downloading the clients, keeping all of the folding directories on said drive and executing them from there...

I think I need to buy one of these and find out

mmonnin

That would be a good investment for something like this.

Straight_Man

Ok, here is how I woudl try that. On an online machine set up a console instance for each instance you want on offline machine-- each one in a seperate directory.

Let that instance get a WU. Stop it when it has the unit loaded and one frame complete. Transfer the whole instance to the "target" machine.

Let's say you have a folder called ZEON1 for instance 2, ZEON2 for instance 2, etc. When instance 1 is done getting its work unit you do instance 2. When you have one per CPU or maybe two, transfer the whole home folder set (ZEON 1 through ZEON#) to the target machine. Set each one up as a console instance. Now, run each instance with the value in the the client.cfg file edited so that the asknet=no is changd to asknet=yes. Make them long instances, because the whole folder\directory for each instance gets transfered BACK to the online machine for each instance to send, then after each instance fetches the next WU after you have forced it to send you get to transfer the changed folder completely back onto the Zeon box and replace the old folder there.

The best way is to LAN this, but you could use a CD-RW to transfer with a portable USB CD-RW drive or do it on a thumb drive of 64MB size. I do not know a way to get one box to run many at once unless you were to get one 64 MB thumb drive for each instance or one for each Zeon box and just uplaod and download to thumb drive if you got a thumb drive of 256 MB per box.

I can tell you the thumb drives would cost more than a CD-RW that could RW at 10X, even given that you can get media like that now (memorex) and the CD-RW transfer to HD and then running off of HD would be faster than a thumb drive if you had USB 2.0 CD-RW and an adapter card for USB 2.0 on each box. This will work this way on Linux and Windows 2K and up. I do not know about BSD, have not tried that. AND your online box must be Linux if the Zeon boxes are, or Windows if the Zeon boxes are.

I have done one WU on Linux and one WU on XP to test, in the past month. You might try that if you can follow the specs given above and note for each is a rep per each instance. I would maybe do tinkers, big tinkers, so they would not have to bemaintained more than once a day. If you do not understand, ask about what you do not understand, but posting a process spec set would need more space than I can stick in a message. However, I might be able to provide something for the team site if wanted. Doing this is one of the things I was educated formally to do. Consider this a late beta process if you will as I am not sure it is universal and have not tried in a FireDaeomon or graphical client.

Edit: Please excuse a couple typos, I typed this live with no spell-check. PM me if you want to know more details, or reply here if mmonnin does nto object. If someone on the team site work group wants to transfer the thread or have it synopsized once details are worked out I can provide basic html you can drop into your site with minimal coding for that or plain text if wanted.