I hate to waste units and gum up the system, so here's a question for all of you helpful experts.

I was recently given an office in my university's Arts and Sciences building, and I get my own computer. I have to logon with Novel but I have administrator status. Nobody else will be using that computer.

Can I install Boinc on that computer, as long as I don't logoff? I'll never have to logff because nobody else will be using that computer - it locks after an idle period.

I've heard stories about people installing Boinc on school computers and sucking up work units that never get crunched. I don't want to do that and hinder the Seti system.

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Hi Matt,

Generally the sucking up of work units
have been with a network with a high number
of puters and the user not maintaining hem
I.E. School Vacations getting fire for putting
unauthorized software on the network etc.

I ran SETI classic on my work station (My Boss Too)
and never had a problem. I would not set my settings
to high so if something did go wrong or you got canned
The loss would be minimal. When the station goes into lock
mode SETI still runs with no problems.

Again My advice is always not set in stone because everyone has their
own opinion.

Timmy

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that should be fine, just recall the line from SETI, don't run on machines for which you do not have permission (essentially, this is at your own risk)

you can even run it only while you are physically there if you want, just set the connect to 0.1 days or something low so as to not pull more than 2 WUs at a time (imho) but again, it is all up to you.

the ppl that are "wasting" the WUs are installing on all PCs in a student lab or something and then the lab gets refreshed or re-imaged and all the BOINC stuff is gone. Many places with public computers will format and re-image weekly or more often.

good luck

{edit, timmy beat me to it ;)}

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S@h Berkeley's Staff Friends Club

Thanks for the help. Now I know that Boinc will run without problems, but now I'm second-guessing whether the university technology people will get mad at me. I don't see anything in the policies that blatantly says I can't run Boinc, but there's certainly enough vague language that implies that they could expand one of their definitions to include almost anything they wanted. Now I just have to decide whether they'd care if I ran Boinc on my computer.

http://www.lehigh.edu/security/computepolicy.html

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> Thanks for the help. Now I know that Boinc will run without problems, but now
> I'm second-guessing whether the university technology people will get mad at
> me. I don't see anything in the policies that blatantly says I can't run
> Boinc, but there's certainly enough vague language that implies that they
> could expand one of their definitions to include almost anything they wanted.
> Now I just have to decide whether they'd care if I ran Boinc on my computer.
>
> http://www.lehigh.edu/security/computepolicy.html
>

When in doubt - ASK!!!

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I'd rather speak my mind because it hurts too much to bite my tongue.

American Spirit BBQ Proudly Serving those that courageously defend freedom.

Well, I don't want to ask and bring attention to this. It's possible that they'd never find out about me installing Boinc on one machine - but when I have to sit down and ask if I can install a program that runs 24/7 using 100 processing power they might cut me off in mid-sentence :)

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> Well, I don't want to ask and bring attention to this. It's possible that
> they'd never find out about me installing Boinc on one machine - but when I
> have to sit down and ask if I can install a program that runs 24/7 using 100
> processing power they might cut me off in mid-sentence :)
>

It may used your system to 100% if your system is idle.. It won't use Network Resoures at 100%..

My point is if you don't ask and it's not ok to run it you could lose your job. Do you want to risk that?

By asking you may find other people willing to crunch WU's too...

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I'd rather speak my mind because it hurts too much to bite my tongue.

American Spirit BBQ Proudly Serving those that courageously defend freedom.

I don't think anyone actually answered your original concern. The problem boxes that you had in mind were those in a lab. The administrator installed BOINC using the privileged administrator account but when students logged on to the computers, BOINC tried to run as 'normal' non-privileged users and didn't have the right permissions to write a file to disk so it wouldn't remember its hostid and would assign itself a new one and download a new work unit every time it contacted the server. Since you would be running BOINC on an administrator account this would not happen.

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A member of The Knights Who Say NI!
For rankings, history graphs and more, check out:
My BOINC stats site

> > Well, I don't want to ask and bring attention to this. It's possible
> that
> > they'd never find out about me installing Boinc on one machine - but when
> I
> > have to sit down and ask if I can install a program that runs 24/7 using
> 100
> > processing power they might cut me off in mid-sentence :)
> >
>
> It may used your system to 100% if your system is idle.. It won't use Network
> Resoures at 100%..
>
> My point is if you don't ask and it's not ok to run it you could lose your
> job. Do you want to risk that?
>
> By asking you may find other people willing to crunch WU's too...
>
>
>
>
>


Oh, I'm just a graduate student. They're not going to kick me out of school because I put Boinc on a computer :)

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>
> Oh, I'm just a graduate student. They're not going to kick me out of school
> because I put Boinc on a computer :)
>
that's true, they might slap your wrist, but so long as you give them $ (or make LeHigh look good) you are safe *smiles*

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S@h Berkeley's Staff Friends Club

Oh, I don't pay tution. Full scholarship through my PhD ^_^

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> Oh, I don't pay tution. Full scholarship through my PhD ^_^
>
best way to go!, and the IT ppl would have no control over the scholarship!
congrats on the scholarship btw!

Thanks. Lehigh is a very generous university regarding its students.

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No work unit gets wasted. If enough results come back they are retired, if there is not enough it gets sent out till there is, or the exceed max times.

Some people that get excited complain if they do a work unit and they find that some one dumped one that is in their basket. The side effect of this is people get paranoid when this is an expected and designed for condition. In the real world work gets lost, same here ...

If it is not something that is not running totally out of control, it is who cares ...

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> Thanks. Lehigh is a very generous university regarding its students.

Yeah. Congrats and good luck. I visited Lehigh with my younger son when he was looking at schools 2 or 3 years ago. No matter which way we walked it was uphill! And it was the only place I've seen where you could enter a building at ground level on the first floor, walk through the building and up a couple flights of stairs, walk out another door and still be at ground level! You'll get your exercise!

That's enough OT for now.

Charlie

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I have installed BOINC on a computer lab at my high school (with the permission of the administration, trust me it took some string pulling) and if you want to check out the stats the account is really far up there. The account name is "Newport Independent Schools." The issues of running BOINC at work/school involve proxy servers and the actual running of the client on the computer.

Installing it as a system service is a great way to prevent the client from corrupting stuff. It will run with full admin permissions nonstop even when on one is logged in. The lab I use is 30 computer set to run between 3 PM and 8 AM. This avoids any possible "problems" due to 100% CPU usage and will PREVENT (a good thing) boinc from connecting during the hours when school is in session. It does waste some time on the weekends but it is worth it to have 30 computers period.

The new version of BOINC that will come up sometime this year (maybe) ;) will have the install as a system service as a install time option. Currently you must run an install script with the command line then reconfigure the default settings. It works but to get BOINC on 30 computers took me about 3 days after school.

Not that anyone cares but I installed boinc as a school technology project and competed at a conference, oddly enough the alien searcher was defeated by a LEGO computer case and a presentation on "What is RAM"

Just thought you might think that is funny.

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<a href="http://www.boincstats.com/stats/boinc_user_graph.php?id=877f93559fda9f7c5a65f974a8763090"><img src="http://www.boincstats.com/stats/banner.php?cpid=877f93559fda9f7c5a65f974a8763090"></a>

I installed BOINC in one of the computers of my school (middle school :) )
I decided to do so because most of the computers have kazaa, e-mesh, other weird games.. ect. so COME ON... if ppl installs all that crap on these computers i will surely wont get in trouble for instaling a program that helps science. (Oh yeah, this is not a computer lab, i would call it 'free-time' class becaue all you do is practice on a program that teaches you how to write on the key board, and then you can do whatever you want on the PCs)

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Well, if anyone is curious, I talked to a couple of computer people here and they said personal software is okay as long as it is legal and doesn't cause any problems.

So, we can welcome this computer (my new office computer) to the Seti team:

http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=469688

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> Well, if anyone is curious, I talked to a couple of computer people here and
> they said personal software is okay as long as it is legal and doesn't cause
> any problems.
>
> So, we can welcome this computer (my new office computer) to the Seti team:
>
> http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=469688
>

Congrats!

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> Well, if anyone is curious, I talked to a couple of computer people here and
> they said personal software is okay as long as it is legal and doesn't cause
> any problems.
awesome. way to go LeHigh for being open and free thinking!

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S@h Berkeley's Staff Friends Club