Heyla.

I've been using BOINC v4.19 for quite some time now, and have been happy with it, but I recently decided to try upgrading to v4.43 in the hopes of getting some pretty screensavers for my machine. So I downloaded the "Standard" version.

Well... I couldn't figure out how to get the v4.43 client to recognize the old project data from v4.19, and as that includes a halfway-finished CPDN unit, I certainly didn't want to lose that. All I tried was to copy the old client's data over to the new client, but that just made the new client go 'Could not connect' or some variation thereof. I think I could have entered the account data into the client, but that wouldn't have made it run the old work units.

Can anyone here tell me how, if possible, to upgrade my client such that it performs much the same way as before (non-root users cannot affect it), with the addition that non-root users can look at what it's doing, both via screensaver and via "looking at the Manager screen"? Non-root users could look at the logfiles I made the old client make, but it's boring reading through them.

My current setup is as follows:

-Power Mac G5 running OS X v10.3.9
-six user accounts (root + sysadmin + 4 regular users)
-BOINC v4.19 runs via root's crontab; that is, it runs at startup and never stops running, and users who do not have access to root (that is, everyone else) cannot stop it.

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The bad news is that there is no way to do this without losing any work in progress. You have to let your work queue empty out before you can safely upgrade. I am not 100% sure about 4.19 to 4.43, but at least with 4.43 to 4.72, there is a difference in the internal structure of some of the XML files. You could TRY backing up all your old files, then installing 4.43, attaching to the projects but saying "no new work", then move just the relevant files into the new folder... but I for one couldn't tell you which files you'd have to move and which ones would cause it to break, and I'm quite sure you'd have to do some manual editing of the client_state.xml, etc. - probably only to find that it didn't work, anyway.

The other bad news is that with the GUI version, there isn't a way to restrict non-root users from stopping it, playing with all the buttons, etc... For that, you're going to be limited to the CLI version, which at least I think (I haven't run the CLI...) gives you the screensavers.

The GOOD news is that by the time your CPDN WU is finished, you should be able to get 4.72 or even 5.xx instead of 4.45 - and there are some major improvements to the work scheduler, etc. I'm running 4.72 GUI now, and it's quite a bit better than 4.45 in many ways, although (grumble) you still can't copy from the Messages tab (hint! Devs!).