KWSN Orbiting Fortress

ToeBee · Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2005 1:09 am Post subject: BOINC Mass Deployment?

Has anyone here experimented with mass deployment of BOINC across 10s or 100's of hosts? #Robot

I know there were some nifty tools to help in such tasks with seti classic and some other projects. Just wondering if anyone has tried it with BOINC.

Obviously running the installer and manually attaching to multiple projects would be a pain on large farms or corporate networks. I think the process can be made fairly trivial though. Here is my theory:

Set up a representative host and attach to the project(s) of your choice. Also create a remote_hosts.cfg file and put in it the IP/hostname of any computers you want to be able to control the clients remotely.
Once things are running, shut it down delete everything that is host specific. My theoretical list of files to keep:

I did just try this and it does seem to work. It contacts the projects and downloads the "master file" for each project and created a bunch of other files and got so far as to assign a host ID under my account request work. Of course I didn't actually want to get work so I only had the account.xml files from projects that aren't handing out work right now Smile

But the concept does seem to work.

After creating a "package" out of the above listed files, you would of course have to copy said package out to all the clients and then arrange for them to start up on boot. This would likely work the same as it did for classic. You could either put a shortcut to boincmgr.exe in the "Startup" folder or install boinc.exe as a system service. I am not familiar with this procedure but I know it has been done and shouldn't be too difficult. On *nix type operating systems you would have to come up with a script to stick in your init system (e.g. /etc/init.d/) or a @boot crontab entry. But if you have root on enough nix boxes to make this worth your effort, you should already know how to do this Smile

I would immagine all of this could be done in windows via some kind of domain login script to completely automate the process. And of course a shell script for the nix systems.

Once they are all installed and running, a tool such as BoincView should be able to make management a breeze.

So has anyone tried anything like this? With seti classic coming to an end I thought it would be a good idea to stir the pot on this issue since we have some "heavy hitters" still running full-steam on classic and if there isn't an easy method to switch over, we may lose them completely and fall out of the top 10. And then the Lizard(tm) will become angry and make our IRC life a living hell Laughing

llama009 · Squire Joined: 12 Jul 2005 Posts: 10

Sounds like an interesting question. There should an easyish way to do it.
We definetly need to make sure as many as possible of them switch over to boinc. Don't want to lose have of the seti user base
_________________
Don't bite off more then you can chew or you will look like a silly llama Razz

AthlonRob · Squire Joined: 16 Oct 2004 Posts: 11 Location: Oregon

BOINC is packaged with the MSI stuff now... and my understanding is this was done to make such mass installs more trivial. It installs like the admins would install anything else. The only additional item you have to worry about is enabling GUI RPC access. So after the admin writes the logon script to install the package he needs to drop the necessary files in place to allow him to access the systems remotely. Namely the remote_hosts.cfg and gui_rpc_auth.cfg files. If you drop those two files in place to allow the admin to administer the boxes from his system, he's good to go.

From there, he only needs to use boinc_cmd and some fancy scripting to attach the boxes to projects:

ToeBee · Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2005 2:27 am Post subject:

Now that you mention it, I do remember hearing about the mass deployement capabilities of the new installer but didn't pay much attention since I don't have massive amounts of windows boxes to admin.

My thought now is this: Why not include the account_<project>.xml along with the remote_hosts and gui_rpc_auth files? Or is it more "propper" to attach to projects via the remote RPC command? Not that a little script like that is difficult... but it is just one more step.

As you said I'm not sure BoincView supports attaching multiple hosts to a given project at once. I haven't updated it in a while and don't use it regularly so it may now have this feature... can anyone verify? But it does look like a very easy way to admin and monitor clients once they are running.